Friday, November 9, 2007

It's easy to be green

My apologies for the lack of blogging the last few days, life has been pretty hectic. I decided that for my last blog I wanted to write about something that hopefully will lead to something good. Recycling.

I live in Fenn Tower with three other girls in my room. As college students, we drink a lot of soda and a lot more water. Usually we go through about 2 cases of water each week. As we started drinking this water we realized how quickly the number of water bottles would pile up. Some days I would come back from class and start cleaning the room only to find 10-15 water bottles in the living room. So, we did what any other board college students might do, we decided to start collecting the water bottles and taking them to a recycling center. About a week ago we had all these bottles in garbage bags sitting in our room and I decided that it would be a fun idea to make something out of them. (Procrastination techniques at their finest.) I discovered that we had saved close to 300 bottles since the beginning of school. So, with some effort, a lot of bottles falling over, and a lot more duct tape, I built a water bottle pyramid that is now being displayed in our front room.

As humorous as this may be, the reality behind the situation is very important. If you look at the statistics, you will understand how important it is that we recycle. According to a major Austrailian news source, packaging for water bottles worldwide used 2.7 million tons of plastic last year and 1.5 million barrels of crude oil in America alone. That is a lot of wasted material on something we pay for when we can get it for free out of a faucet. Now, I do understand that we live in Cleveland and that the water here isn't always the greatest, so there is something else we can do. Recycle. It's as easy as saving up the water bottles, pop cans, glass bottles, paper products, anything that you can...and recylcing them. Simple. Even though saving 300 bottles may not seem like enough, if you consider that 300 is not even the extent of the bottles of water that the 4 of us have consumed, we could have saved close to 500 bottles just in our first few months here at CSU.

All I have to ask of you is to make an effort. Throw away your pop bottles in the designated recycling bins around campus, take them to a recycling center, do something other than just throw it away. People say it's not always easy being green, it's not easy to save an environment that is already ruined. I say that people need to have a more optimistic outlook and start trying and hoping for the best.

I wish you all the best, have a great long weekend and thanks for reading.

Natalie

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Habits and Opportunities

I’ve decided that for today’s blog I’ll write about something that’s a little less “in your face,” unlike the feminism rant that I had yesterday. Today I want to write about habits.
As humans, we are all creatures of habit. We like things to be constant and normal, with some variations here and there. We eat the same foods, drink the same drinks, follow sleep patterns, and we try, for the most part, to keep ourselves on a somewhat routine schedule. This is not necessarily a bad thing in most cases, having something constant makes the world seem safer and easier to all of us. I know that I enjoy having a schedule to follow when it comes to my classes and work, it just makes life seem a little bit simpler. (And as we all know, life is not usually a simple thing.) However, I’ve come to find that habit can also hurt us in a way. Habit takes away opportunities, and that is what I’ve chosen to talk about today.
Stop and think for a minute, think about how it is that you walk from class to class each day. Do you follow the same pattern? Do you take the same set of stairs, walk down the same hallways, and pass the same people? Most of us find the easiest path to take from place to place and then follow that path every time we have to go there. This makes sense, it is easy and habitual. Now stop and think again- if you were to break a simple habit, like walking from class to class, is it possible that you could gain new opportunities? Absolutely. Think about it, if we were to all take different paths to class, we would pass new people in the hallways, gaining new opportunities to meet new people. You might walk past a bulletin board with a flyer that you’ve never seen before, giving you yet another opportunity to meet people or do something new. Doing something as simple as changing the way you walk to class once in a while can open up an entire world of new opportunities.
Of course, walking to class isn’t the only example, doing something different like eating lunch at a different time or with a different group of people can give you more opportunities. Even the idea of eating a different food, something you’ve never tasted before, that is breaking the cycle of being a habitual person. Even doing something outside of your comfort level will give you opportunities. I am a pretty shy person, but I try to talk to people that I don’t know so that I can make new friends. This puts me outside my comfort level, but I’ve met lots of great friends in college because of it.
My challenge to all of you is to do something different today or tomorrow. Walk on a different path to class, make an effort to talk to someone new, eat something new at Viking Hall, go to the rec center at a different time…do something different. You never know how much your life might change from a single difference in one day. You could meet someone you never knew existed, but that could turn out to be your new best friend in a couple of weeks. Do something outside of your comfort zone, you never know what good could come from it.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Feminism and Today's World

Before you all judge me and stop reading this you should know that I'm not just some crazy feminist who hates all men. However, today in my Race, Class, and Gender class we watched a movie about cultures where women are treated as property rather than as humans. It was called "Shackled Women" and it was extremely disturbing to me. I know that CSU is a very diverse school, and absolutely none of this is meant to offend anyone of different cultures, it is just how the movie portrayed these cultures that made me think. I realize that not all cultures are like America's and that this is normal for many people, but this is from a Westerner's perspective.

The movie discussed, for the most part, eastern women and their lives. It discussed things like bride burnings, rapes, and women killing their second born daughters because they would be such an economic burden, or as the movie called it, an economic impossibility. There was a woman who told the story of her three children. She had three children, now she has two. Her husband killed their second born because she was a girl. Not only did they never discuss what they would do if they had another girl before she was born, but he did not even tell his wife that he was going to kill their daughter until after he did so. Disgusting. I know that this is a cultural thing, but honestly, where is the compassion in the world? Just because a baby is born as a girl does not mean she deserves to die. Not only that, but the movie discussed rape and institutionalization. In Pakistan there is a law that states a woman is only raped if there are 4 males to bare witness to it. So she can report the rape, but it will only be considered rape if she has 4 men who will testify as witnesses. If she does not have these 4 men, she is then thrown in jail for having sex outside of her marriage. So women do not report rapes nearly as often as they should for fear of being prosecuted for a crime commited against them. Is there no justice? Honestly. Even with that, there is the problem of domestic violence, which is a constant in these countries. Bride burning is a phenomina that happens constantly. If a woman's family can not pay her dowry (which is illegal, and usually constitutes a family's entire life savings) or if she is not performing as she should, the man's entire family will burn her to death. My professor said something about families throwing acid on the faces of wives and blaming it on a kitchen fire just so the man can get a new wife and thus a new dowry. Obviously this is all a cultural thing, but this occurs in America as well. How often do we hear about domestic violence because a woman is not doing what she should? How often do we hear jokes about how women should be "barefoot and pregnant, standing in the kitchen"? We can make these jokes as often as we want, but it doesn't make them right. Women have come such a far way in Western society, but in Eastern society the cultures are 100 years behind the progress that we have made. I will never take for granted again the idea that I can marry whomever I want to marry. These girls are married off at 11 years old to a man that is much older than her and to a man she has never met before her wedding day. Girls are institutionalized for becoming upset over the idea of arranged marriages. On their wedding days they are forced to be completely quiet and helpless, as women should be in their marriages. They must act completely dependant on others to show that they will be the same way for their husbands. I've always considered myself to be a pretty strong willed person, I couldn't imagine having to submit myself to that kind of torture. It has always interested me as to the reason girls want to be skinny. Is it to attract men? Not to be healthy, not so that they have self confidence, in most cases (or so I've come to find) it's so that men will want them. Even in Western society it is all about pleasing the man. It would be hypocritical of me to say that I have never done this, because I have, but it doesn't make it better. The fact of the matter here is that the world as a whole seems to be largely patriarchal, this is never going to change. Women take on their husband's last names, they are expected to cook and clean for their husbands, perform the sexual duties of being a wife, but it is very rare to hear about a man doing the same. Granted, stay at home dads are becoming more and more common, but not common enough to say that it is making any sort of a difference. Think about the idea of prostitution, the entire idea is to please men. Women are sold into sexual slavery just so that a man can have the pleasure of owning a woman, whether it be for an hour or a lifetime. Little girls are taken from their homes or sold by their parents just so they can entire a lifetime of sexual abuse and slavery. This is a reality, not just something you see in the movies or you read about online- it's completely real. Every day thousands of girls are kidnapped, as young as 5 years old, just so that some perverted man can own a woman. You don't hear about this with women owning little boys (I'm sure this happens occasionally, but the bulk of it is the other way around.) One thing I have learned about throughout the last few years is that there are a lot of things that are going on in the world that most of us know about but we never really stop to consider. I have never stopped to consider the fact that women will kill their own babies because a culture is so unorthodox that it is considered normal instead of looked down upon. Girls, the next time you stop to think "Hmm, I wonder if my boyfriend would like this on me," or tell yourself that you need to be skinny in order to get a man, just remember that there are women all around the world who are so unfortunate that they actually have ceremonies if a girl survives to the age of 18 because it is so rare. And boys- don't take your girls for granted, love them for who they are, curves, imperfections and all. This is not a perfect world, but if we would all stop being so judgemental we would be much closer to perfect than we are now. Getting past these ideas is the first step.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Back to Business

The trip to California ws all too short. Both of my children, Jack and Molly, have chosen to go to large schools; Ohio State and the University of California. We are great supporters of public universities and I believe that there are great academic offerings at the three that we are associated with (CSU, OSU, UCSB). my husband also completed his masters at CSU. The culture at all of them are different, the geography different, but college life, is college life. What I didn't explain in last nights blog about UCSB, is that the campus is on a peninsula along the Pacific coast, about 8 miles north of Santa Barbara, California. It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the west, and the Santa Inez Mountains on the east. The mornings are very often foggy, and by late morning the sun is shining. If you have ever seen the movie "Gorilla's in the Mist", that's what the fog on the mountains looks like. The other thing that is very different about UCSB is that just about everyone of the 18,000 students has a BT cruiser bicycle. It's a bicycle that has kind if high handle bars with a basket where you sit sort of straight up and they are all really vibrant colors. To see all the bikes parked, you would think you were dropped by a time machine into another world. It's kind of surreal. But everyone has one; the campus has traffic jams between classes and if you are not careful, you just might get run over. It's really something to watch a bicycle collision, it happens more often than you might think. The best sports team there is guys soccer and womens and mens basketball.
This is my last blog. I hope that everyone takes an opportunity to be a part of the honors blog. It's worth the time.
Have a great rest of the semester.
Barbara Reitman

Hello from UCSB

From the west coast to the north coast, hello from California! I am visiting my daughter at the University of California in Santa Barbara. This happens to be family weekend here on campus. So the campus is a buzz with special acivities.
Molly is living on a theme floor, the Asian Pacific Island floor, because her major is Mandarin Chinese and she thought it would help her learn more about culture and have some built in language tutors. And she was right! Her roommate is Katy who is from Santa Ana. Her friends are great! A couple of her floor mates do speak Mandarine, including her RA, Anna.
We spent Friday night in Santa Barbara on the famous State Street, and today we had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, went shopping for normal college stuff (clothes and FOOD). Because California is so far, Molly will only be home at Thanksgiving, so I am glad I was able to come to visit for this weekend. It has also been a great break after having just finished the NASW conference. We are having a really great time and I will have to come back to Cleveland tomorrow morning. Have a great upcoming week.
Barbara Reitman

Friday, November 2, 2007

Thankful for November!

Octotober was a month that couldn't have passed fast enough. The last couple of weeks I have been furiously busy getting ready to present a paper at the Annual Ohio Conference for the National Association Of Social Workers. For all University Honors Students that are Social Work majors, this is required as part of our program. My presentation, "The Subtle Side of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome" highlighted how difficult it can be to accurately diagnose the disorder, how damanging drinking alcohol during pregnancy can be to the unborn child, how uneducated the general population is about the damaging effect alcohol has on the unborn child and that early interventions are nessary to help minimize the deficits children suffer as a result of this lifelong disability.Preparing for this presentation was a daunting task. But, if we never do anything outside our comfort zone, never challenge ourselves to go further, then we miss an opportunity to grow, academically, professionally and personally. I am glad I succeeded and feel very proud of what I was able to accomplish.Now that it is behind me, I can concentrate on something fun. Tomorrow I am on a plane to Santa Barbara, California to visit my daughter. She is studying Mandarine Chinese and Spanish. I am really looking forward to a weekend away; miles away from any power point program that might becon me.BTW...graduation does exist. I received my completed application for graduation in the mail, got signatures for all my final classes for next semester and am ready with schedule in hand for 11/5/2007 when I can register for my final semester in my undergraduate career at CSU. Just in time, because graduate applications are staring me in the face! Have a great Friday and I am planning to wriate again from Sunny California.
Barbara