Chel Me About It
By >Chelsea Stevens
This past week, I was able to scrounge up enough time to find a time machine and pay a visit to my old high school. If you haven’t already gathered this from your unfailingly avid readership, I was fortunate enough to attend Long Beach Polytechnic, home of scholars and champions. As I paced its empty halls, catching bits of sentences through each open classroom door, the frizzy-haired, acne-scarring years came flooding back to me. I still remember every ounce of blood, tears, and dignity I spilled on those scuffed linoleum floors.
Peering into my favorite english teacher’s class, I was struck by the old look of high school agony and anguish in each of her students’ faces. Half of her sophomores, who were supposed to be reading passages from East of Eden, were using their books to hide the fact that many of them were actually working on their trigonometry homework, or making cheat sheets from their AP U.S. History books. High school really wasn’t that long ago for me, but one thing I can barely remember is what it’s like to be almost an expert in six different subjects. High school kids learn more about the world in a single semester than I’ve learned here in the past three years.
My father happens to teach at Poly, and while I was sitting in on one of his advanced jazz classes, he made an analogy that related music to atomic particles. Now, my dad is a very smart man, but he doesn’t know jack shit about physics. “What are those things that make up atoms called again?” he asked himself, trying to make the comparison work. Suddenly, his shy baritone sax player came to his rescue. “They’re called quarks,” he murmured. “There are six types of them, called ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘top,’ ‘bottom,’ ‘charmed,’ and ‘strange.’”
My jaw fell right off my face. I mean, if someone in my jazz theory class could spout the scientific name for anything off the top of their head, I would probably shit myself. I would give a dollar to any engineering major who could tell me what happened at the Battle of Little Bighorn, or any liberal arts major who still knows what two sides of the triangle you need to find cosine. But we all knew all of that in high school. Having talent in multiple subjects was considered a mark of intelligence, a major advantage.
And now, safe in the padded confines of our academic denominations, we’ve become entirely content with the daily masturbation that occurs when you major in something you’re good at. There’s no place anymore for the kids who were good at a little bit of everything. Instead, we’re expected to become copiously specialized in the thing that comes most easily to us, so we can hope to make a career out of it someday. But we forget that there are so many other things out there in the world, to see and do and learn about, that have the potential to save us from becoming these one-note zombies for the rest of our lives. The jacks-of-all-trades don’t always fall to the masters of one, and I think it’s time we bring back the Renaissance man.
Have a polymathic week everyone, and thanks for reading. Go Jackrabbits.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 April 2012 19:20
Chel Me About it
By >Chelsea Stevens, Illustration by >Rose Feduk
At a few times throughout the year, the staff of the Union Weekly likes to present a feature that builds our scathingly sarcastic asshole street cred. This is not one of those times. Like last year’s ACT program feature on college students with mental disabilities, or our piece on veterans returning to the school system, or “How to Get Laid” (just kidding), this issue of the Union should melt the frozen, decaying cockles of your heart.
With all the drama surrounding Invisible Children, Joseph Kony, and the dehydrated shenanigans of Jason Russell, we decided that we should make this week about the less depressing side of nonprofits: all the millions of poor, starving, dying people in the world that are in serious need of help, and the people that are actually trying to provide that help to them. These people exist everywhere: Africa, Japan, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, the Philippines, New Orleans, California, even Long Beach. You know, it’s cool though, let’s forget about all that and keep speculating how much cocaine Russell must have done to make him jack off in public.
Anyway, because I couldn’t shut up in the feature about the amazing guys who make up We Still Believe, I didn’t have room to discuss all the other Long Beach charities everyone should care about. Our city has a pretty dire economic gap, so nonprofit organizations in Long Beach have to hustle to make even a smidgen of a difference. Luckily, we have some pretty great ones—not only do they care a lot about the city and its people, but they’re really fun to volunteer with.
Below are a few organizations that are worth your while, as well as an event taking place this weekend that will be donating its proceeds to charity. For more chances to get in touch with nonprofits, CSULB will be hosting a Nonprofit Organization Fair on April 23nd, on the southwest terrace of the USU from 11am to 2pm. If you have a charity organization you feel strongly about, feel free to let me know about it—we’d be more than happy to cover an upcoming event or shed some light on your cause.
Have a compassionate week everyone, and thanks for reading.
Last Updated on Monday, 19 March 2012 21:17
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Chel Me About It
The closest I ever came to student government, besides running this tyranny of a newspaper, of course, was becoming a Conflict Manager in the fifth grade. At Fremont Elementary, Conflict Managers were like the Vince and Jules of the playground. Minus the brain-soaked cars and Bible quotes and half-dead Uma Thurmans. I guess we weren’t really like Vince and Jules at all, but if my ten-year-old self had known any better, I would have run around the school every day screaming “English motherfucker, do you speak it?!”
Anyhow, Conflict Managers were actually a pretty big deal at Fremont. You had to fill out an application for the position like a big girl job, and if selected, you got to patrol the schoolyard at recess and lunchtime with a wooden clipboard clutched to your bright orange vest. We were trained in the most advanced techniques of kindness and compassion. Once on the job, we were first on the scene of any kerfuffle between students of all shapes and sizes. We taught them that instead of saying, “Your face smells like my dog’s butt,” it’s better to say, “I feel that your face smells like my dog’s butt.” Because of us, Fremont was a safer, friendlier place.
My best friend and I cunningly decided to apply for the job after we found out that the two boys we liked were applying and were in need of partners. Each Conflict Manager got to choose a partner of the opposite sex, who spent three hours a week walking romantically through the concrete fields with them. Amanda and I schemed that if we got the job, we would request our two clueless lovers as our first-choice partners, seduce them with our prepubescent feminine charm, and they would be our boyfriends in a matter of days.
Our plan worked better than we could have imagined. The Conflict Managers were announced a week later, and it turned out our entire circle of friends had been selected. The popular kids got to rule the school with some actual power to back us up. We could give pink slips to whomever we wanted, and send all the kids we didn’t like to the principal’s office, and we did it all while flirting with our sexy ten-year- old boyfriends. That was the life.
Now that I’m in college and dealing with real-life bullies, I wish I had some morally sound Conflict Managers to take care of all my problems. Instead, Cal State Long Beach provides us with the less-impressive collegiate version: ASI student government. And not unlike my experience in Conflict Managers, it seems like ASI is just a big group of friends that happen to have landed in positions of power. Many of our elected officials are very close with each other, and the ASI Treasurer and Chief-of-Staff are currently in a relationship.
When the school was reminded by the Daily 49er last year of the hefty paychecks given to the top five positions in student government, which equals more than $20,000 in benefits and scholarships, many students began to question ASI’s role in our daily school-related lives. CSULB will have the chance to prove how much they do or don’t care about student government this week, as we vote to fill every position from student body president to department senators. Due to students wanting to make a difference in the current chaos surrounding Sacramento’s vindictive budget cuts to the CSU system, ASI has seen more candidates this semester than ever before. But will newcomer candidates be able to break through the group of experienced friends that have controlled ASI for years? To get to the bottom of the entire mess, Entertainment editor Steve Bessette decided to interview some key members of student government, and find out what really goes on in the bowels of ASI. Do they really make enough of a difference to deserve their excessive perks? Find out on page 8. As for me, I’m going to put on my orange vest and get back to my Oreos and Spongebob.
Have a conflict-free week everyone, and thanks for reading.
Last Updated on Monday, 12 March 2012 19:18
Chel Me About It
So, as a select few of you may or may not know, I am, in fact, a woman. Please don’t spit out your coffee. I know this can come as a surprise, but it’s just who I am. I may not be the sluttiest or the girliest girl out there, but I clean up pretty decent sometimes, and if I push my boobs together real hard I can get a respectable cleavage. That’s what qualifies you as being a woman, right? Cleavage? I should probably stop talking.
There’s a certain stigma about being a woman in the journalism biosphere. As the typecast news domain usually dictates, the sexy reporter in her tight skirt and lacy bra can bag any interview she wants. She doesn’t have to actually sleep with the rich white guy she’s trying to get a story on, she just has to have the boobs. And, as I’ve previously pointed out, I’ve got the boobs.
I’m saying all this because this week’s issue of the Union Weekly was supposed to feature our star-studded basketball team, which managed to clench the title in the Big West tournament last Wednesday. Their success was largely guided by the team’s talented point guard, Casper Ware, whose myriad of accomplishments has brought him more media attention than we’ve seen for a CSULB athlete in a long time.Ware is currently nominated for the Bob Cousy award, which is granted to the best point guard in all of college basketball. No player at Cal State Long Beach has been nominated for this award before.
I’m not the most fact-spewing basketball aficionado out there, but I could have done a respectable job with Ware’s interview, and the Union could have spread the story of the team’s victories to an area of CSULB students that don’t get much news from the sports arena. I was downright giddy with excitement when I was told how easy it would be to get Casper to talk with us, and I had hopeful visions of the feature being littered with pictures of me schooling him on the court one-on-one. That’s actually not even a possibility, as my jump shot makes me look more like a handicapped parrot than someone playing basketball, but a girl can dream. And I’d already talked myself into this dream becoming a reality.
So understandably, when I contacted the head of media relations for CSULB’s athletics department, I was all too confident that I’d soon be strolling into the Pyramid to find Casper sitting there primed and ready for a Union Weekly interview. All I’d have to do is email off a polite request, and my wish would be granted. And
after a multitude of calls and emails, I finally received a response: no. No, Casper Ware will not do an interview with you.
Apparently our top-ranked basketball team has better things to do than sit with a lowly school reporter like me as I shamelessly shower them with free publicity. I understand that I’m “just a kid,” that the Union Weekly is “all satire anyway,” and that college journalism is a “big fat joke,” but I have two things that undermine all of those stupid statements. Boobs.
So I ask you this, Cal State Long Beach campus: what the fuck good are boobs in journalism if they don’t get you anything? What does a girl have to do to get a goddamn interview around here? Turn tricks? Well, I’ll tell you something, athletics department: it’s not going to happen. It just won’t. I will not stoop to your level.
Casper, if you happen to read this and feel like going out for a drink, give me a call. Your media director has my number.
Have a winning week everyone, and thanks for reading.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 28 February 2012 20:19
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