WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 4,2013
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opinion
What ever happened to people calling each other "Home Skillet Biscuit"?
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
This is the first non-miserable Tuesday morning I've experienced for my walk to 7:30 a.m. lab in TOO long.
After a week of relentless searching and a full can of Glade, my roommate and I cannot find the source as to why our room smells like feet.
Article title: "Charlie Weis Ready For Off-Season"; Aren't we all? "Off-Season" aka basketball season.
The only thing I hate about December is that guys start shaving again. Let the boys stay!
Since when was Harry Potter a Christmas movie?
I wish I didn't have a roommate so I could use Siri more often.
This Kansas weather is playing games with my heart.
Hey guys, can everyone just stop releasing new albums, movies and games until this semester's over? Thanks. Maybe cancel my Netflix subscription too.
I'm pretty sure I'm the gay best friend to several girls, even though I ain't gay.
I wish I could watch several of my professors read my evaluation.
Binge watching The Harry Potter movies instead of studying for finals so yeah I'm not feeling stressed.
All students get into the volleyball game on friday for FREE. Come support our girls!
If you've never had Dillon's Private Selections 'Denali Moosetracks' ice cream, you haven't lived.
Every time I see people biking up Daisy Hill I try to shout encouraging things.
I love watching Louie, but I just feel shame when I actually relate with him.
How much egg nog is left in the world, and how can I have all of it before the holidays end?
ud anyone else hear a Jumani
drum beat in the Wescoe
lecture halls today?
The first two HP movies are way cute.
Hey, cowboy boot hater: people like you are the reason why half of Kansas doesn't trust KU.
COMMUNICATION
Younger generations sacrifice decency for efficiency
Same.
Somewhere between the aisle dedicated to egg separation and the floor-to-ceiling wall of assorted toilet seat decorum, I unintentionally set a social experiment into motion in the hub of sensory overload: Bed Bath & Beyond. After I realized my life would probably be complete without microwavable slippers and an automatic M&M dispenser, I turned my attention from the somewhat apocalyptic robot vacuum cleaners to my fellow shoppers. I consider myself a people-watcher in the way others consider themselves triathletes
— it's a committed lifestyle. In my study of consumers in their natural habitat, I noticed quite a paradox. One that isn't unusual, but one that I found myself stuck on.
It goes like this; while entering said Mecca of Trinkets, I walked past two elderly women waiting by the door, presumably for a ride. Feeling a surge of friendliness, probably stemming from the wave of artificial Christmastime-smell
pumped through the vents, I engaged them: "Hi there, isn't it beautiful out?"
Even before I spoke to them, the women met my entrance with wide smiles that seemed genuine. They immediately responded with enthusiastic echoes of "Oh yes, it's lovely!" and some chatter about how it hadn't been this warm this far into November in, oh, I don't know how many years. We parted with polite smiles and I felt a little twinge of contentment with the world — that is until it was replaced by lust for a jumbo looaf with a handle (How had I been washing my back my entire life?!). Cue two girls in Kansas apparel, around my age in the shower curtain aisle. I walked near them and they shot me that quick head-to-toe survey laced with thinly veiled distaste that girls know all too well. Undeterred, I smiled and said "This place is so ridiculous, I know I don't need any of this, but I just want to buy it all!" Easily responded to, if they took
Easily responded to, if they took the bait. Just as I suspected, I
received a coolly fake, one-syllable half-chuckle and punctuated with a, "Yeah," and our interaction was over.
The contrast between my first and second interactions was stark, and sadly, predictable. It's perhaps common knowledge today that an age increase positively correlates to friendliness with strangers. It's widely accepted, as if being on the defensive is a status symbol and aloofness is its sacred companion. Why is this? As our generation begins to grey and pay a mortgage, will we suddenly accumulate a sense of polite and kind regard for our neighbor? Or are we, like older generations, a product of our times?
Without a glowing screen mediating all potential interaction, perhaps our grandparents learned socialization the "old-fashioned way": with the other red-blooded, hairy mammal seated next to them on the bus or behind them in the line at the store. Perhaps our inability to, or distaste for striking up casual conversation is reflective of how we've learned socialization: through deliberately worded statuses, painfully posed pictures and the proper amount of ellipses and conservative spacing of smiles. We exist in this invicible, consequence-free virtual space, able to rip apart or falsely gush over others without feeling the weight of reaction, without understanding the liability of our words. We can homogenize our interactions, and ignore harshly worded emails until we're ready to respond just as harshly. An ability to respond spontaneously cannot be fostered in an environment where the ignore button is always a preferable option.
It is impossible to ignore that
this is the nature of our culture and that our generation is stereotyped as apathetic as a result. So how much does my feverish little Bed Bath & Beyond escapade really matter?
It is a clue that our hyper-reliance on virtualized socialization has deflated our ability to be present and receptive to the real, three-dimensional world around us, strawberry hullers, electric blankets and all. My experience may seem shallow at face value, but in its essence it is a perpetuation of this stereotype. Stereotypes can rise from interactions with a member of a group we find representative and like it or not we are all representative of our negatively received generation. If we hope to change the way we're perceived and represented, we can start with a basic trait: simple kindness.
Erin Calhoun is a sophomore pre-med student from Naperville, Ill.
Internet provides limitless information, but little control
I am so incredibly sick of the Internet. The throwaway culture, the anonymity and the constant assault of information have finally worn me down.
I started out enjoying it all,
convinced that I was living in a golden age of information. I could use a search engine to root out any fact or opinion I wanted.
My friends were one click away.
Everyone around me was enjoy-
ing the ride too, passing links back and forth like love notes in class. At first it's funny in that embarrassing way. Then it's annoying having to reach over to Julia's desk every five minutes for a delivery to Joey. And then you go berserk whenever Julia so much as twitches.
Hear me out; I think that the Internet is eating away at our culture and certainly my sanity.
culture and certainly my life. It made everyone so self-indulgent. I can't believe how self-involved everyone's become. An endless cycle of over-sharing and one-upping each other transformed my feed from an entertaining collection of friends to a circle jerk of flattering photos and humble brags.
If there's a hell, it's an endless stream of memes being forced into your eyeballs Clockwork Orange style. They morphed from funny image macros to cringe-worthy nonsense in a
matter of months. A ame at its root is a single joke — just one joke — being repeated in different contexts over and over again.
Once parents and tweens found them, there was no going back.
And they're everywhere, being shared back and forth constantly with links to videos that went viral in 2006. And that, I've decided, is the worst part of today's Internet. With sites like Reddit bringing millions of users together merely to consume, all of the content becomes circular.
I've grown jaded from watching the same baby mispronounce fire truck while his parents howl wildly with laughter in the background. I've become bitter from the circus of cats being scared by their reflections or falling off a table out of the blue. I am just so sick of having to wade through all of the crap I've seen a million times already just for a kernel of more of the same trash.
At first, having news articles at my fingertips was amazing. I was
constantly on the cutting edge of every developing story and nothing flew by my radar. But it became frustrating reading five articles a day about gay-bashing in Russia knowing I couldn't do a thing about any of it.
Reading first-hand account after first-hand account of the atrocities in Syria made me feel like a true armchair activist for a while. But then it merely depressed me knowing all I could do was watch a country eat itself alive. And I couldn't stop. And neither could anyone else.
It's mostly my fault. I've spent way too much time on the computer and too little outside in the real world actually living. But don't blame me too hastily. All of these sites and all of this content are engineered to be addicting. They're selling ad space. They're selling my clicks. A twenty-something in Silicon Valley is being paid to figure out the silver bullet meme that will inhabit all of our Facebook feeds for eternity.
And that at least is comforting: knowing I'm not the only one wasting away in front of a dimly lit screen.
vii Kenney is a sophomore majoring in English from Leawood.
Make time to be a kid and reduce your stress
this weekend I had an epiphany while I was crouching behind a
Sometimes you just have to step back, take a deep breath, and think about things from a new perspective. During break, I chose to think about my life like an 11-year-old would.
Because it was Thanksgiving, I got together with all my family, so I spent a lot of time playing and talking with my cousins and my brothers. While the adults in my family shot questions my way about the future, the kids insisted I play hide-and-seek with them (Sardines, to be more specific). When the adults questioned me about my relationship status, the kids made disgusted faces and asked if I wanted to play charades
crouching behind a covered grill — sometimes I take life too seriously. About this time in the semester when all of my papers are due and every test is threatening to break through my expanding web of panic, I can't help but notice that small things become a much bigger deal. Suddenly every question on every test could decide what job I get. Every word I write seems to be deciding my future.
What this made me realize is that sometimes, especially when you're at your most stressed, it's nice to just let yourself be a kid. I spent a lot of the time during break playing hide-and-seek, and even though I'm pretty sure I exceeded the age and height
FFA OF THE DAY Only Thor can look badass while riding a scooter.
It was also a lot of fun because I got to catch up with my cousins while we played. Instead of counting, we often just talked about common interests until it seemed like they'd had enough time to hide. I found out about how their school was going, we spent a good amount of time geeking out over the Doctor Who 50th anniversary episode and generally I got to catch up in quick, fun conversations. I might add that not one of these conversations involved a mention of my future.
I think what this weekend really made me realize is that I'd like to look at my future from a kid's perspective. I want to see my future as a game of hide and seek. I may not know where it will take me or how long I'll have to look for it, but I know that I'll be excited when I do eventually find what I'm meant to do.
Anna Wenner is a junior majoring in English from Topeka.
ot the average player, I didn't do too badly. At one point it was declared by several of my cousins that I had come up with the best spot.
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