Isolation and Awareness at MSU

CAUTION! A late night lengthy diatribe with a tad bit of soap box makes for opinionated blogging!

I've done a bit of thinking about my history as an MSU English major and I'm not entirely thrilled with it. Mostly, I try not to dwell on the lunacies of the university (luniversity?) since they're enough to make anyone feel depressed. I suppose now is a good time to list some of them.

• Skyboxes for the football stadium. This hugely expensive monstrosity of a bad idea has to be listed first. "If we build it they will come" was the mantra. They built it. No one went. It was expensive.
• Giant rusty noodle. $50,000 dollars was spent on that giant rusty noodle next to the SUB. The only thing it does for students is it gives us something to wonder about during class. Just how many folf discs have been lost in the thing?
  
• New chemistry building. That abortion of a structure ruined the best trees and best grass field on campus. Interestingly, the very year it was built, there was an exodus from the graduate chemistry program. I heard lots of dirt about this from a chemistry grad who was friends with my then roommate.
• My Portal. So bad and so expensive that my memory of the 3 minute tirade I unleashed bashing my portal in a room filled with people responsible for managing it (it was either coincidental or perhaps providence) doesn't even make me smile. It was the most frustrating thing telling teachers and administration over and over and over that, sorry, there is no way in hell I was going to use it.

So what's the use of complaining about these frustrating things? It makes me feel better. However they also illustrate a point. The decision to implement these things shows the divide that exists between what I think and the reality around me. Big expensive decisions that affect students are made without consulting them. If you doubt me, go sit in one of the newly remodeled classrooms in the basement of Reid. It cost millions of dollars and students will be paying for classrooms which are so poorly designed, the chairs so abysmally uncomfortable, that the act of teaching in these rooms is now significantly impaired.

These things are easily understood as stupid yet I've had to live with them as a student. It's surprisingly difficult when you deal with it everyday. It's just as difficult, if not more so, to find that the people who I would most closely relate to actually posses a nearly insurmountable wall. I've never understood why "enlightened" people in the college of letters and sciences support factory farming by spending money on it's food products. This is the most absurd contradictory practice I've ever seen in any group of people anywhere in my life! How can people who can accurately and imaginatively dissect Shakespeare, debate philosophical catch-22's, find the importance of our past as a representative of our future and somehow find beauty in our political structure support what is conceivably the greatest cruelty ever conceived by man? There's only one analogy I can think of to describe what I feel like every day.

About 90% of the time I feel like Bill Murray on his first repeated day of Groundhog Day. In this one thing which is so important, every day is the same. Nothing ever changes. Smart people say the same smart things. Wilson hall still feels like a prison. Parking still sucks. The same potholes are in the same spot on 8th next to Cooper Park. Down to the details, it feels like Groundhog Day to me.

(doesn't he look angry instead of confused?)

The two words that continually resurface as I write about my college experience in my notebook while digging for epiphanies (no standard epiphanies) are isolation and awareness. As I become more and more isolated from the people around me, regardless of how many classes I take or what I do to socialize with other people, I become increasingly aware of the absurd eating habits around me. As I become ever more aware of the differences between me and everyone else I see on campus, my experience of isolation continues to increase. In this instance, college hasn't provided me with an epiphany. It's provided me with the means of watching lots of other people who are smart enough to connect the dots and have this food based epiphany fail or simply not do it. I get it. People don't want to go vegan. I know that's not going to happen and the whole "let's support local farming" argument is terrific. I support supporting that. Specifically, what I don't get is why people who claim to support local businesses go buy food frequently from restaurants and grocery stores which ONLY source their animal ingredients from factory farm sources. The "I support local" argument should be an even stronger argument against not eating that crap. Anyway, it pisses me off.

Maybe when I read this after I wake up I'll have more input or some grammatical corrections to make.