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THE UNIVERSITY DUMY BANSAN
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014
PAGE 4
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opinion
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
Text your FFA submissions to (785)289-8351 or at kansan.com
Please help me understand what is comical about the octopus and the churro comic in today's paper. Cash reward for any information leading to comprehension.
That schedule isn't even close to exact --everyone who has ridden the 36 bus
Is it bad that I routinely sabotage people to ensure a healthy job market for myself?
Editor's Note: Did Frank Underwood send this FFA?
The greatest home field advantage in the nation doesn't just happen. Get off your phone and make some noise!
Ten straight conference titles is all right, but you know what I REALLY want.
We like Bill so much we got him not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, not 5, not 6, not 7, not 8, not 9, but 10 rings for his finger.
JOBS
To the person wanting a lover who is dying for the new Kingdom Hearts game... Marry me?
When submitting an FFA while telling a story and asking about how long a submission could be, I got a text back saying "there is no limit, but this one is too long" ... Contradiction much?
To Mr. or Ms. 17 hours, try 19 hours in two consecutive semesters.
EngineerProbs
woke up and found pieces of game day confetti in my bed and shower.
A KU bus just honked, I didn't even know they had that function.
Working full-time and taking 17 hours has helped me realize that Watson is is the best place to sleep.
The new Godzilla movie is bringing back the 1990's look and roar of Godzilla? My childhood is so pumped right now!!
Budig smells like freshman year. I hated freshman year.
I'd love to know what I did in a past life to earn the crap I have to deal with in this one.
How acceptable is it to hit people who sit during basketball games?
To 17 hours person: just pretend going home is a vacation!
I did not know it was possible for the AFH to be that quiet...
I have such a crush on Joel Embiid!
To "A Bus Driver": Of course I know there is a schedule. I was actually going to ask you that question, because you are never on it.
Applying for jobs is like entering Wonderland
Today, I finally understand what Alice must have
Alice must have felt like, I've followed the bustling white rabbit of college right through the hole of senior year, and I am falling — or drifting, rather toward the Wonderland of finding a grown up career.
Even worse are the friends and fellow seniors who don't have job applications — grad school, med school or internships-turned job offers; they've already got it in the bag. These are the people who smile quaintly when you sigh deeply and complain about searching through a sea of job postings and how you feel like a lump of coal pretending to be a diamond. They smile quaintly because they either 1) remember their own stresses in the search and application process and have very little sympathy for your complaints (if they can do it, you can too), or 2) have never experienced the job
It's a dizzying, suffocating business, full of booking yourself too busy (it's your last year here, you don't want to miss out on something!) and still managing to catch up on three seasons of some show on Netflix. It's a time when you have no time, because seriously, who invented job applications and why do they take so long?
search process and do not understand its underlying intricacies. Either way, these are the people we dislike most when we are spending our 6,000th hour re-editing cover letters and resumes (we still want to hang out next Friday night, though).
H
To make my own sob story even more sad, let's add in the humanities degree that I will so proudly hold in my
hands in a few months' time.
It is wrong to assume, as many do, that a degree in the humanities, like English, will get you nowhere unless you want to teach. This simply isn't so — and that joke is so old I watched it grow a beard three years ago.
In fact, it's the complete opposite. There are so many job openings that the English major is qualified for (because honestly, who — besides an English major — remembers the rules of grammar and writing, as laid out by your middle school teacher and "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White?), it's almost too much. I get dizzy
just thinking about all the different directions my life and career could take.
and career goals.
Perhaps this ramble is dismal. Perhaps you'll find no comfort in my words.
Perhaps I'm your Cheshire Cat, only causing you more confusion. Perhaps you've gone a bit mad. Perhaps we all have. Just know that you aren't alone in your wibbly-wobbly navigation toward graduation, and at some point, we'll find our way out of Wonderland, hopefully with our heads still on.
DIVERSITY
Tasha Cerny is a senior from Salina studying English.
Clear the air of confusion surrounding LGBT culture
As a columnist who usually writes about religion, LGBT topics are almost unavoidable. I just didn't expect to write about it so early. But with recent states striking down their same-sex marriage bans and with Kansas' HB 2453, it's been on my mind a lot.
In my opinion, much of the opposition to LGBT rights, especially when it comes to people dissenting on moral, religious grounds, comes from misunderstanding sexual and gender minorities. I think that the core of this misunderstanding comes from the way opponents to LGBT rights view gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals as products of unbridled desires.
A marriage between a man and a woman is celebrated as a union of love, but a relationship between two men is equated to sexual perversion. I understand that same-sex couples might mess up the picture-perfect narration of boy meets girl,but, believe it or not,the same kind of love that is admired in straight couples exists in same-sex couples too.
This inability to see the humanity in same-sex relationships goes hand in hand with categorizing queer individuals as people suffering from sexual addiction. Perhaps they think, "Why else would someone want to sleep with someone of the same-sex unless their desires are out of whack?" Related to this is the slippery slope argument that legalizing
same-sex marriage will lead to incest and bestiality.
The criticism of LGBT people I hear over and over again is that they're on this slippery slope of desire. I hear: "If everyone followed their every want and desire, what's next?"
LGBT individuals think something must have gone terribly wrong for someone not to have the same feelings as themselves, as if queerness is what happens when we let our desires go. I say this comes from privilege because it's really easy to criticize an identity that is not part of our lives.
I may be preaching to the choir here, but I'll say it anyway: LGBT individuals experience just as wide a range of healthy (and damaging) relationships as anybody else. They fall in love. They also suffer breakups. Many are in committed, monogamous relationships. And just like other human beings, some may experience one-night stands. They can also be single. And some might not even want a sexual dimension to their romantic relationships (this would be the case for asexuals).
Trans identifications are also often misunderstood as results of unbridled or abnormal desires. Newborn babies are always celebrated as being boys or girls American parents wait anxiously to find out the gender of their baby so they can paint the nursery blue or pink. But when these boys and girls learn about themselves and grow into trans individuals, they are seen as people acting on irrational feelings
Opponents to recognizing the personhood of
They are not in LGBT persons' heads or bodies and therefore don't know what it's like to be gay, lesbian, bi or trans. If they've never questioned their gender or sexual orientation, this is privilege. Of course it's "queer" to them that people have different sexual orientations and gender identities than they do. But haven't we all felt "queer" at one point in our lives? Wasn't there a time when you felt misunderstood, lonely or different?
These misunderstandings of LGBT persons do a huge disservice to understanding across the political and religious divides on LGBT issues. It's about time opponents soften their rhetoric and see queer people as human beings like themselves. We should learn to love others as we want others to love us.To give others the same generous and compassionate space that we wish others would give us, so that our own "queerness" might be understood.
Garrett Fugate is a graduate student from St. Louis studying architecture.
FFA OF THE DAY When you cough in budig 120 after 10 other people cough and the auditorium suffers a cough-induced mini earthquake.
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As I've entered college and grown up, a hard thing for me to grasp when I started was that I wasn't going to be with my family. Yes, I could visit them or they could visit me but it was never again going to be my mother, father, sister and me living under one roof.
It was a sad realization, yet it's something everyone deals with in their own way. Especially in a close-knit family like mine, it's something I had been somewhat dreading. Yes, I wanted to move on and grow up, but there will always be the side of me that knows my parents' home will always be my home. Though it is becoming more real every day, it has been a long time coming.
My sister is two years older, and when she left for college my junior year of high school, that was the first small step I took toward adulthood. When I left for Lawrence in August of last year, I faced another hurdle in becoming an adult: distancing myself from my parents
As almost any college student can relate to, the first semester of the year I felt lost. I had no one to go to for advice, which is when I turned to my friends. A new sort of family. Something I had to adjust to.
Like I said, we were all dealing with similar new experiences. I had to rely on my friends to keep me on track, just as they needed someone to keep them on track. It sounds childish, but a simple word
Our friends will always be there for us like a second family, helping us through the challenges we face on a daily basis. Yet, this does not mean our true families are gone. If you have a strong support system with friends and family, it makes it that much easier to stay on the path you want to take.
G. J. Melia is a freshman from Prairie Village studying journalism.
Without parental figures in the equation, it's a lot easier to get through life if you have someone making sure you're staying on the right path. Last semester, there would be days I didn't want to go to class, but my friends would convince me that it probably wasn't the best idea to skip.
of encouragement, or an "I'm here for you" can go a long way.
Now, it's the second semester. I am much more able to take care of my responsibilities, as I've been through half a year on my own. I've grown up a lot in the past year, in large part due to a change in scenery. And also a change in family. Being away from my parents forced me to grow up, but it also forced me to find a second family.
@tmoose0988
@KansanOpinion The administration acknowledging and addressing the needs of the nontraditional student population-25% of the student body.
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@KansanOpinion Underground tunnels.
@MorganAideen
@KansanOpinion A full-time LGBT Resource Center Coordinator, & LGBT inclusive healthcare, & no more hateful bible thumpers on Wescoe beach
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansai Editorial Board are Katie Kutso, Allison John, Lauren Armendardt, Anna Winner, Sean Powers and Bolly Potts.
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