The Met #2

Although I have already posted about the Met, there was so much to do and see that I have to talk about it again. In the African Artifacts exhibition there was a tapestry that shined on the wall, made out of smashed up bottle caps and other metal refuse. Its colors transformed from red to gold to little dots of blue and black and green. It didn’t hang like a rug on a wall, but rather a piece of armor, contorted and rigid. In the Oceania room, a ginormous boat floats on the ceiling, layered tiles of different colors, sliding against the skylights. In the Egyptian exhibit, there is a sphinx and remnants of an ancient building, warning mortals from entering. A moat surrounds the sandstone blocks. The water is shimmering and black. The ripples from the filter never quite make it to the middle. It is the pit, bottomless and suffocating that marks the boundary between the living and the dead, the Nile inside an otherwise light room. The sun shining in through the wall of glass can’t push into the water, can’t even make a dent. The only dots of color under the water’s surface are the pennies glinting and flashing. They are the holes poked through black construction paper replicating stars.

Wrapping it all up

This is my final blog post because as of today, kinda, my senior project is over! How sad!! Tomorrow is the giant relay, which Ms. Post and I have been tirelessly planning throughout  my project! I hope you all come and have an absolute BLAST!

So, to wrap up my final post I just wanted to tell you all what my suggestions are for the house system after 3 weeks of work, research and brainstorming! 

 My first and probably most important suggestion is to create more houses. With 4 houses with 100 people in each right now it is just too hard to organize and execute events that will engage or entertain the whole house. If there were 8 houses with about 50 kids in each house the meetings would improve, events would be more manageable and there would be less of a bystander effect on the house system as a whole. My next big suggestion, which relates to the last, is to have less leaders. There is an apparent bystander effect on the leaders and things just aren’t getting done. With one senior, one junior and one sophomore it would be a lot better. A single leader to rally the troops and excite the house, one junior to be in charge of organization and one sophomore apprentice would be best. My next suggestion would be to integrate a peer buddy system into the house. I would love to see this buddy system between juniors and freshmen so that the underclassmen had someone to look up to for more than just a single year. Also, juniors are more engaged in the school environment at the time the freshmen need help, whereas the seniors have developed senioritis. The buddies would serve as a guiding light to look up to, do a holiday gift exchange, help with scheduling and be a friend to the buddy. My next suggestion is that teachers should always be assigned to the same house and legacies should always be honored. These things create momentum for the house system and would make teachers and students more engaged. My next suggestion is to give students some choice in what house they end up in. I would love to see a survey attached to freshmen course registration that asks them which of the house service initiatives they are most interested in. My last suggestion is to have the House Leader elections at the same time as Senate elections. Right now house leaders appear to be lesser leaders than the Senators because people who lose Senate races very often run to be House Leaders. This stigma is very impactful and hurtful for the house system as a whole. Overall, I think the most important thing that needs to change is the engagement and enthusiasm of the leaders themselves. They are the heart and soul of the system. Their enthusiasm (or their lack of) has the ability to make or break the entire system.

THANKS MS. THOMPSON FOR ALL YOUR HELP ALONG THE WAY!

Shop Till you Drop

Today I had a change of location and I can safely say I finally understand the phrase, “shop till you drop.” One of Haven Style House’s co-owners, Cori, and I took a client shopping for her wardrobe as part of the personal styling service offered by the store. Although she did not buy products from Haven Style House, the client paid fifty dollars an hour for the service. We started shopping at 10 in the morning and we did not finish until 3 in the afternoon. Although it was tiring, it was a lot of fun to pick out clothes for the client. The client was an older lady with a very particular style, which was challenging since I had to choose clothes I thought she would like that I did not necessarily love myself because I needed to match her style. I felt accomplished and helpful whenever she loved something that I picked out for her. I was happy I could find clothing for her that made her feel pretty, comfortable, and slim. We started the day in Nordstrom, picking out items before the client even arrived because we wanted to be prepared and we knew that she had a specific style so we wanted to help her by narrowing everything down. We then ventured to Jcrew and to Banana Republic where she also found great pieces for her wardrobe. I am so happy I got to experience a full day of personal shopping because it is unique to the store and I wanted to see first hand how it was done. It was a great way to end my project because I got to put what I learned into action and personally help a client. 

The Duck Days Are Over :/

Unfortunately my senior project is coming to an end. I've enjoyed working with this team so much and I can't explain how welcoming and accepting they were to have me on for the past 3 weeks. During my final days I have been getting my final interviews done and working on my final video to present on Friday. One cool thing that I got to do on Tuesday was help my sponsor Christina get a point across to the rest of the departments. She wanted everyone to take pocket schedules a couple weeks ago and no one followed through. So she had me make 100 pocket schedule displays and set them up in the meeting room for the department meeting at the end of the day. Along with those she asked me to bring up close to 25 boxes of pocket schedules so that each department can take a box and get them out around the area. I thought this was funny because she wanted to get her point across to take pocket schedules and it was fun helping her get back at the other departments. I also really enjoyed doing this because it gave me something to do around the office, pocket schedules are a big deal for the team because they promote the games and allow fans to keep up on when the teams in town and how there doing. The people here are amazing and I'm glad I got to experience how a professional sports team operates and what happens behind the scenes instead of what's going on, on the field. This project has increased my interest in sports marketing and has reassured my ambition to study the sports marketing field in college and hopefully get a job in it someday. I want to thank the Akron RubberDucks for allowing me to have this experience, and I am for sure coming back to visit and attend games in the future.GO Ducks!

Post 9: Red honey

At 2PM, Red Hook, Brooklyn bakes in the unusually warm autumn afternoon. Brownstones squat shoulder to shoulder and project their gritty soap light, slow moving barges tan the Hudson like alligator skin. If there was a word to blow the city’s hot reek from the page to your nose, I would find it; the acrid, sulfuric daytime stench mitigated only by the galloping breeze. The population finds themselves vying for shade as they fly through. A man, beneath a streetlamp, struggles with his lighter so that the scraping sli-click fails his cigar. Above the gridded streets on rooftops and awnings is where the bees in question call home. Urban beekeeping, legal in New York City since April of 2010, has been attractive to amateurs and experienced apiarists – that’s the decorative word for beekeeper – as a hobby and a livelihood respectively. Cerise Mayo has been a keeper in Red Hook and Governer’s Island since May of 2010, and still fairly new, was perplexed when she peeked into her hives that evening to discover her bees’ nectar bellies glowed amber in the sunlight, almost fluorescing. While it’s a common notion that anything can happen in New York, this was not supposed to happen.

“I thought maybe it [the ‘nectar’] was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” Mayo told the New York Times. But the bees, it became apparent after the honey was sent in to an apiculturist for lab analysis, were dipping into waste from the nearby Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company. While the factory in Dikeman Street churned out sundae toppers and cocktail embellishments, the bees were churning out honey the same shade as Robitussin. Red Dye no. 40 and high fructose corn syrup pointed to the culprit, or, more correctly, the unbeknownst partner in crime. The honey tasted “metallic and overly sweet” according to similarly afflicted David Sarig. The Brooklyn Kitchen was quick to jump onto the bandwagon and offered red goo tastings to the curious gourmet anyway. Sarig, in a later interview, assured his customers that local keepers have “had contact with the cherry factory owner who has committed to better control his marinating facilities for next year, so that our bees don't consume his cherry juice next spring and summer.”

Still, Mayo and other activists of the homegrown food movement couldn’t understand why the honeybees, who had acres of urban farmland to forage from, would ever choose chemically-derived saccharides over their organic spread. Andrew Cote’, the then president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, addressed the issue saying that “bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to three miles,” and bees found the rouge runoff cloyingly similar – at least in taste - to nectar. 

Post 8: NYC Foodies

New York City, colloquially known as the ‘Big Apple’, might be more aptly known as the ‘Candied Apple’; the inflow of sweet-toothed tourists and the local demand for the buttery and the fudgy has led to an upspring of accommodating dessert shops that pander to our human indulgence. On a hopping Friday night up to 3AM, the frantic Insomnia Cookie delivery woman will still be buzzing from 50 W 8^th Street to her resident cookie monster with boxes of snickerdoodley goodness. Billy’s Bakery will serve you one of the city’s best slices of red-velvet cake (the size of your head) for a little over five dollars, and Café Lalo - with its Christmas light-swathed trees heralding the hungry foodie year round - offers everything from whips of banana chocolate mousse to biscotti that won’t break your jaw. In Times Square, it’s a short walk from buying a five pound Hershey’s bar to gorging yourself on the M&M rainbow.

New Yorkers love their sweets. But this definition of New Yorker extends further than the clever cabbie or swanky socialite: this definition encompasses the junk food-loving honeybee. 

Wednesday Night in Manhattan: A Poem

The giraffes from the zoo move

in slower colors.

Their necks cream and grey

soggy paper cups that looked

this morning like half-hearts

beating under leaves.

Farmers markets are pale

behind her eyelids, faded

newsprint wrapping itself

around the synapses in

her brain. Honeycomb is light brown,

jam spreads like liquid paper

with globs of strawberry. It foams,

froths in her mouth.

We know the rubber bands,

little bits of trash. The chicken painting

on the wall. The wicker headboard pricks

like a rainbow porcupine.  

The salty heat of coffee. The man

twenty stories down who crosses the street

with a cat on his head. No matter the smell

of the market, this morning is a

shadow of now.

Post 7: Good night

My phone bleeps and I roll over onto my stomach. The air mattress deflates a little. God, who could be texting me at this hour? Light filters in through slattern windows, though it’s manmade light, running down the window like an egg yolk. It’s one in the morning, Siri tells me. Thanks, Siri.

“Good night Ali! LY!” The text reads; it’s my dad.

He’s done this almost every night like clockwork; I guess I know his schedule better now that I’m away. And every time it makes my heart soften a little: I am what he thinks about before he hits the hay, his daughter halfway across the country.

Suddenly, the prospect of leaving again doesn’t seem so ominous.

I sneak a glance at Sarah and Elizabeth, both sprawled out in slumber, and wonder what communications with their parents have been like. My parents afford me a lot of freedom, not that watered-down freedom that is so often force fed to teenagers. I mean real freedom, the freedom to explore myself and the environment I find myself in.

Afterworld NYC

According to a sign on Amazonian Afterlife in the American Museum of Natural History, “At death, Amazonian Indians believe, the soul leaves the body and travels to the afterworld, far away on earth or in the sky. They do not believe in a heaven or a hell. All souls go to the same afterworld or, if there are several, which souls go where depends on how people died rather than on how they lived. For example, a violent death may send a soul to a different afterworld than a death from natural causes.”

New York City is the afterworld of death by choking. The Union Square Market is a pale imitation of markets in poetry. There are few aromas, and when there are, they come in wafts of wet trash, rather than clouds of grilled meat or fresh flowers—peonies look more fragrant and purple than they smell. Everything is dense. Apples the size of a baby’s head, crumb cakes like bricks of butter and shortening with crisp apple toppings. Pies that weigh as much as a woman, and woman selling them who weigh even more. Blocks of cheese sweating in the early-morning dew while the Camembert is left to sleep in dark  boxes lined with wax paper.

New York City is the afterworld of death in soft chairs

A woman hogging the larger table beside us at the bookstore has her iPad out, switches between playing games and reading a book on her Kindle app. In her flowered dress, pink beads, and black bonnet, she’s dressed for a 1950s garden party. Every time we talk, she gives us the stink eye, and I can’t figure out why until I see the pink beads. It must be hard living in the wrong decade, pretending SoHo is a Parisian Plaza. Her flats have black bows on them, and she orders a grilled cheese with Vermont white cheddar and Dijon mustard. She asks for “no mustard,” but the sandwiches are premade, so she settles for a straw in her can of Blue Ribbon.

A List of Things for the Scrapbook

Before we left home, my mom promised Alix, Elizabeth, and me mini scrapbooks to put all of our ticket stubs, etc. in when we got back. Below is an incomplete list of things I kept in my purse for this scrapbook, which may or may not give you a sense of how we spent our time in NYC:

• A receipt from Alice’s Tea Cup, “New York’s most whimsical tea house!”
• A business card from Alice’s Tea Cup
• Two movie tickets for X-Men: Days of Future Past at the Lincoln Square Cinema
• A business card from Fat Witch Brownie Bakery: “Witches are baked just for you. Make them disappear in a week or put them in the refrigerator or freezer.”
• A business card for Richard Townsend from MOBIA (the Museum of Biblical Art)
• A ticket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: General Student Admission
• A movie ticket and receipt for Chinese Puzzle, a French movie, at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas
• A receipt from our first grocery shopping trip to the Gourmet Garage with 64 items listed
• A ticket for the Cort Theatre on 138 W. 48^th St.: Daniel Radcliffe, The Cripple of Inishmaan
• A card from Shake Shack: “Present this card on your next visit for a FREE SHAKE”
• A ticket for the Longacre Theatre on 220 W. 48^th St.: James Franco & Chris O’Dowd, Of Mice and Men
• A ticket from The Frick Collection for admission on Tuesday, May 27^th, 2014

Post 6: Balto?

Elizabeth and I saunter down 66th in the heat of the day, talking about Disney movies.

"You ever see Balto?" I ask.

"Like a million times," She flails. "He's at our museum!"

I'd seen him there before.

On a basic level, I empathize with Balto because, like a half-wolf and half-dog that finds it difficult to fully identify with either half of his heritage, so much of how I understand the world comes from my sense-of-self as a person of two places.

My mom was the first of her eight siblings to go to college, and she worked her way through as a totally financially independent woman. But we come from a place deep in Louisiana that doesn’t value education the same way that the rest of my immediate family does. I love my huge extended family, but my upper-class, predominantly white, suburban prep-school education often makes me feel estranged from them. Simultaneously, I will never completely feel at home with my cousins as they race each other on tractors in the southern heat.

But this dual nature, I’d like to think, gives me a unique perspective in the world, much like it did for Balto. He saved hundreds of children once he was able to marry the two parts of himself. I think, if I could do that, I could do good in the world too. 

Post 5: Post Graduation Jitters

The day after this year’s Columbia graduation, I picked up one of The Daily Spectator’s newspapers to flip through while waiting for the M60. Senior profiles were a new concept to me, and while I perused with one eye on the street, an article caught my attention: a recent grad named Lulu was discussing her community service on campus. In her interview, she said that it totally shaped the next four years of her life, and for the better.

Well, if you want me to tell you the truth, I felt empowered. Before she had even gotten to Columbia, she felt that the university and the experience she had there totally changed who she was and what she stood for. That could be me, I realized. I could have a transformative experience, something really meaningful that helped me carve a path for myself. This is a real opportunity for real independence.

I set the newspaper down and stared out at Ollie’s Noodles for a bit. All of a sudden it hit me: what I’m going to be doing at Columbia is going to have a real impact on the world. I could do great things for people, really help them the way others have helped me or the ways I wished I could have been helped. I could make some lifelong friends before school even starts based on our love of outreach and aid. I want to connect with people who want the same good in the world that I do.

When the M60 finally broached the curb, I packed away my Spectator, thought of all of the possibilities that Columbia posed, and was truly, honestly excited.