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(09/14/05 12:00pm)
You may have had to leave Fido barking at home, but living on campus doesn't mean you have to be completely pet-free. Options may be limited, but look around and you'll be sure to find a pet that is suitable for campus living.
Looking for pets that are inexpensive and fun, many of the College's residents turn to fish, which are easy to maintain.
"Betta fish are very easy to care for and are quite popular because they are difficult to kill," senior English major Courtney Rydel, the proud caretaker of a betta fish named Neptune, said.
In order to keep your betta fish alive and healthy, change their water once a week and feed it twice a day.
To change Neptune's water, Rydel scoops him out in a cup, uses a strainer to keep the pebbles in the bowl, rinses out the fish waste and refills it with fresh water from the tap.
She also adds specially formulated drops from the pet store that neutralize the chemicals in the tap water so it does not kill the fish.
"I think watching a fish swim is relaxing," Rydel said, explaining why she opted to get a fish. "And betta fish are visually stunning."
Lizards are often thought to be easy pets to care for, but Jackie Hehir, senior English and women and gender studies major, disagrees.
She rescued her anole lizard, Frodo, from the biology lab her sophomore year. The lizard was originally used for an experiment on how lizards respond to heat, and was going to be released into the cold New Jersey winter where he would have quickly died.
To take care of Frodo, Hehir feeds him a dozen live crickets every three days and keeps his tank at a minimum temperature of 80 degrees.
She sprays down his tank when it is dried out to keep him moist and comfortable, and provides him with an ultraviolet lamps and a heated rock to provide optimal survival conditions.
The lizard's cage only needs to be cleaned twice a semester. Hehir spent approximately $280 for the lizard's fake trees, heating pad, rock, wood chips and crickets.
The only downside to having a lizard is that it may not be the most playful pet.
"You can't play with him because he'll run away," Hehir said. "He doesn't like people."
Hamsters and gerbils may be considered more popular pet options. Senior biology major Kathy Bet owned three dwarf hamsters in the course of her time at the College.
She was given her first hamster as a gift and loved it so much that she felt the need to replace it when it died.
The three hamsters were quite easy to take care of, as they were so small that they hardly ate anything or produced any waste.
As long as they are fed and given fresh water every day, with their wood chips changed once a week, they don't require anything else.
For the glass tank, wheel, ball, water, food and wood chips, it cost Bet between $20 and $30. The hamsters Bet bought were about $10 each and their food and wood chips only cost $1 a month, making a hamster a low-cost animal.
Besides feeding them, there are only a few more things you have to worry about with hamsters.
"Hamsters are self-cleaning animals, and you don't want to get them wet because they can catch a cold which can kill them," Bet said.
If you do not want to get a pet that requires a lot of maintenance, other options are pet rocks, Chia Pets and Tamagotchis which are suddenly popular again. They require very little attention and can be forgotten about with little to no guilt at all.
It's never been easier to own a pet on campus, thanks to the office of Residential and Community Development's policies that allow students to bring pets from home without getting a permit.
The guide to residence living says that fish, turtles, hamsters, mice, gerbils, small guinea pigs, iguanas, lizards and hermit crabs are permitted, as long as they are contained within a glass tank that is no larger than 10 gallons.
(11/17/04 12:00pm)
The Visiting Writers Series (VWS) will host its last writer with a reading by Creative Writing Professor Dan Pope. A former lawyer who went for his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the writer's workshop program at Iowa University, Pope recently published his book, "In The Cherry Tree," before coming to the College to teach upper level creative writing classes.
Pope answered a few questions for The Signal before his reading, which will be held at Brower Student Center 202 East in November, exact date TBA.
JG: Where are you from and how has that environment influenced your writing?
DP: I'm from a suburb outside of Hartford - West Hartford - which is the town described in my novel, 'In the Cherry Tree.' All the stores mentioned in the novel - those are real places that used to be there but aren't anymore, like Mayron's Bakery, which is where my father took us to get pastries as a treat when my brother and sister and I were little.
Part of my goal in writing that book was to try to preserve all that long-gone stuff, the world of my childhood, which it seems is a different type of childhood than kids have today. We didn't wear bike helmets, for example. The idea of bike helmets seems pathetic to me. I mean, you bang your head on the pavement, you lose a few IQ points - that's good for a kid.
And cell phones, hate those things - at least how people think they have to have them "in case something happens." Stuff is supposed to happen, and you deal. Now I see people wearing them on their head - these cell phones with headsets - while sitting in coffee shops, like some sort of dunce cap. I mean, you wouldn't want to miss that call from the telemarketer, right? I know a woman who had a GPS device implanted in her daughter's neck. Her bulldog too. The whole family is GPS-ready, like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Back when I was a kid my mother would open the door and say, 'Get out. Don't come back for a long time.'
Growing up in the suburbs, well, that's been the backdrop of some of the things I've written. Richard Yates once said, 'Life forever is the great lie of the suburbs.' I like that. Where you grow up, your family - that's the hand you're dealt, as a writer. Flannery O'Connor said that, 'Anyone who's been through childhood has enough material to write about for a lifetime.' Or at least one or two books, I would say.
JG: You worked as a lawyer for several years. When did you decide it was time to focus on your writing?
DP: The lawyer stuff - that was all the other, robot side of my brain. I didn't really work as a lawyer. I sort of dabbled. I specialized in writing briefs for other lawyers who don't know how to write. I did some stuff in court, which I liked mostly because I got to dress up in Brioni suits and slick my hair back and say things like, 'Under the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur' - I would throw in as much Latin as possible, always. But most of the time it was me sitting at home in my underwear, plagiarizing other court briefs at the cost of $150 per hour.
I always believed I was writing fiction, but then I realized, sometime around when I turned 30, that I'd worked approximately six years on a 20-page short story called 'Lydia's Ex.' It's a funny little story, I suppose, but six years! It should have taken about one week. That's when I quit the legal stuff, started eating at a lesser grade of restaurant and began writing a lot more.
JG: What is 'In the Cherry Tree' about, in your opinion?
DP: It's about leaving boyhood - crossing that bridge out of innocence. Primarily.
JG: How did Timmy, the main character of your novel 'In the Cherry Tree,' develop? Was he a planned character or did he spontaneously appear on the page?
DP: I found him in my diary. I kept a diary when I was 13. I came across it a few years ago - one of those my diary books with a little latch and key - and opened it to this page that said: 'Steve and I ate 408 cherries. It was the greatest cherry eating day in history.' Bingo, Timmy was born. That was once the first line in my book, but it got pushed back a few chapters in the final draft. But the voice was there, in that old diary - short, staccato, factual, emotionless, deadpan, absurd.
JG: If you could meet any writer who inspired you, dead or alive, who would it be, and why? What would you say to them?
DP: I discovered the work of James Salter about eight years ago. He's written these wonderfully sad and elegiac stories and novels - 'Light Years,' 'A Sport and a Pastime.' You gotta read this guy. It just blew me away. He writes sentences that just stop you in your tracks. I read some stories, like "American Express," over and over, and then realized I was learning how to write from him, although I'd thought I already knew how to write.
Then a few years later he came to a crummy used bookstore in my town to do a reading, as a favor to the owner of the store, and I showed up and said, 'Hi, I'm Dan Pope, I really like your books' - and he literally jumped out of his chair and said, 'Dan Pope! My God, it's so good to finally meet you! What an honor.' He grabbed my hand and began shaking it. I said, 'Ah, um, er.' Turns out, he had been corresponding for years with some other dude named Dan Pope from New York. A case of mistaken identity. It took a while to get that straightened out, but now we correspond by letter as well: he and the two Dan Popes.
JG: You wrote an essay called 'The Curse of the Second Novel,' detailing how you spent time trying to decide on your next piece, and how you often would find new ways to procrastinate, something every college student can relate to at one point or another in his or her college career. Has the curse been broken yet?
DP: The curse lives on, sort of, mainly because I'm writing short stories now, even though my agent and publisher are waiting for the novel. I just have to get these stories off my desk. Then - onward.
JG: Who are you currently reading?
DP: Shirley Hazzard. My god, where has this woman been my whole life? She's in her late 70s or early 80s. Her last novel, 'The Great Fire' is just so good. And 'The Bay Of Noon' as well. You read her and you say, 'Well, I'll never be that good.' It's humbling, but exhilarating.
(11/04/04 12:00pm)
To the Editor:
Mike McCaffrey tells women, "You deserve so much better than to be treated as an object of pleasure and then be forgotten about." What I'd like to know is why does McCaffrey suggest that only women will feel the emotional impact of a hook up that means nothing more than just that? Why does he himself create a double standard while trying to argue that it is terrible to treat women as hookups?
He does not reprimand the men on this campus for continuing their promiscuous behavior, nor does he even mention the psychological ramifications a hook up may have on a young male psyche.
By writing this article and leaning towards the idea that mostly women suffer hurt when they have a sexual experience of some sort, McCaffrey encourages the idea of men being shameless in their sexual promiscuity while promoting women to feel shame in having less than monogamous relationships.
This appalls me because he defeats his intended purpose of telling young women to stop "damaging" themselves and instead encourages them to take comfort in their "root insecurity that makes them seek emotional bonding." I find this to convey the wrong message to women who may read McCaffrey's piece, because it tells women that they have no good reason to indulge in sexual promiscuity as men do.
I can think of several confident and self-assured women that I have met throughout the course of my life who have found it perfectly acceptable to experience as many partners as they can within safe moderation. They have not been emotionally hurt on repeated occasions, as McCaffrey suggests may influence women who look at sexual activity casually.
They choose to indulge in this behavior because there is more to life than going from one relationship to the next and waiting for their Prince Charming to come (if there is such a thing as Prince Charming out there any more). There is nothing wrong with being a woman who is interested in a monogamous relationship, but there is no reason to penalize women who are not, as McCaffrey does.
Don't try to pinhole the entire female sex into being needy and entirely monogamous. If men can be promiscuous, why can't women? Why do women need to be subjected to relationships with men who will treat them like sexual playthings once they are established in a relationship? In a relationship, a hookup and eventually sex becomes an expected activity, a repeat condition of a monogamous relationship that gives women less of a choice because they're often subject to what their significant other wants.
By choosing to remain free of a relationship, it gives women the power to choose who they want, when they want, and how they want. I fully support anything that gives women the power to choose.
(10/20/04 12:00pm)
The Visiting Writers Series, which brings up-and-coming and reputable authors to the College, is getting ready for another event, but this time with Amy Benson, an adjuct professor of the College's creative writing department. She comes to the College fresh after publishing her first novel only months ago, a memoir entitled "The Sparkling-Eyed Boy."
Benson took some time to answer the following questions before her upcoming reading at the Don Evans Black Box Theater in Kendall Hall on Oct. 28 at 8 p.m.
JG: Where are you from and how has the environment you grew up in influenced your writing?
AB: I'm from Detroit. Both of my parents worked full-time and I was a latchkey kid. So, I spent a good deal of time alone, reading and in my own head, which is essential to a writer. I think you have to be a fairly interior person to be a writer (or an artist, scholar, etc). You have to be able to get quiet and access the stranger parts of your brain. But just as important to my material as a writer was the enormous time I spent as a child in wild natural places, either on camping trips across the country or during summers spent in the upper peninsula of Michigan. I got a healthy sense of smallness and wonder from seemingly endless forests, lakes and mountain ranges.
JG: What got you started on writing?
AB: I really can't explain it. I was a biology major, philosophy minor in college and in my junior year I started writing poetry. I had always written little snippets of things, but had never thought of it as "writing." But I found myself interested in the speculative side of every class I took. When my plant physiology teacher told us that we had to "learn how to think like trees," instead of wanting to learn the biology of the nitrogen cycle, I wanted to write a poem from the perspective of a tree. So, I decided I was headed for the poverty and ruin of the arts rather than the exacting riches of the sciences.
JG: How did you come to teach at the College?
AB: I'm filling in for Cathy Day as she is touring in support of her book ("The Circus in Winter") this semester. I'm teaching two
206 classes and am really enjoying the students so far.
JG: What is "The Sparkling Eyed Boy" about?
AB: "The Sparkling-Eyed Boy" is based on my summers spent in the isolated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which was in some ways the polar opposite of my home in Detroit. To me, it's a memoir of place, class and the ethical dilemmas inherent to growing up. Those born in the UP often don't leave for a job or an education - and if they do, they are sometimes not easily able to with one local boy, a boy who stayed, and the many meanings he and that place still hold for me. Over the years, I have become increasingly divided from him (and thus, from that beautiful, rural place) mostly through education and a sense of mobility. For me, the book tries to pinpoint a common struggle: for a solid identity in our increasingly mobile and fragmented lives. It uses autobiography and some fiction to help clarify the unnameable sense of loss and possibility I felt as I got older and lost contact with the world of the UP.
JG: Who inspires you?
AB: In terms of writers? Anyone who reaches for big, big things. I'll just name a few contemporary writers: Louise Gluck, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Li-Young Lee, Anne Carson, Joan Didion, George Saunders. The College's own Catie Rosemurgy has always been a big inspiration to me. And then those people who, in good humor, do decent things with their time without guile and without expectation for reward. They inspire me.
JG: Why do you think book readings are necessary, for both the audience and the author?
AB: Well, I'm not sure they're necessary but they can do some good. It's conditioning for our brain wiring to hear out loud a collection of beautifully crafted sentences. And it allows us to do so with a group of other people. Reading is such a solitary experience; a reading then lets us experience something together at the same moment and allows us to talk about it afterward. I know I've understood poems that have puzzled me for years when I heard them read aloud by the poet. They get the tone and the rhythm just right and all the pieces fall into place. It's good for the writer, too, I suppose. Nothing will help you edit a piece faster than reading it in front of a group and hearing it clunk.
JG: In your novel, you include a chapter on the ethics of nonfiction, explaining that a writer will always use an event or conversation as a potential written piece. How do you think people should respond to knowing that nothing is private when it comes to being friends with a writer?
AB: Run, run, run. Really. I'm not kidding. Or pick writer-friends who have a moral compass you can live with.
(04/07/04 12:00pm)
Where does one go to report a missing loved one in Juarez, Mexico? One can't, and doesn't, as Amnesty International (AI) shared with students at its Candlelight vigil last Monday.
"According to information received by Amnesty International, in the last 10 years, approximately 370 women have been murdered, at least 137 of which were sexually assaulted prior to death," AI President, Kevin Semanick, senior finance and statistics major, said. "Furthermore, 75 bodies have still not been identified."
The tribute to the women of Juarez, Mexico began in February with the Vagina Monologues, and continued to AI's candlelight vigil on March 29 in front of Brower Student Center. Semanick led the group in a moment of silence, in commemoration of the lost and missing women of Juarez, before ending the candlelight vigil.
In a moving tribute to the missing and victimized women, Jessica Boston, acting treasurer for AI and sophomore psychology major, and Jeanette Franco, secretary and acting vice president and junior physical education major, read names of victims, before being assisted by other attendees of the vigil.
The candlelight vigil was supported with votive candles and Semanick took a moment to introduce the small group.
As a basic human rights group, AI serves to speak out for prisoners of conscience, who have been imprisoned because they spoke out against their individual governments, Semanick said. AI will not take on any cases where the prisoner of conscience protested in a non-peaceful form.
AI has maintained a status of being politically neutral to ensure that the human rights campaign will be the most important issue it tackles as an organization.
However, membership has become a setback to the organization, due to the lack of core group members that are consistently involved with AI.
Semanick said that if the organization could tap into the resources of various community service organizations membership would increase.
"That's what makes Greek life so effective," Semanick said.
Future events and campaigns are decided between the group members in a relatively democratic process. If enough interest is shown in a particular campaign, AI chooses to adopt that campaign.
In the past, AI has organized events such as letter writing campaigns, coffeehouses and tabling at this year's Vagina Monologues.
Semanick said it is difficult to be an effective organization due to the low number of members.
However, AI's letter writing campaign on National Coming Out Day on the behalf of Egyptian homosexuals who were imprisoned for being open about their sexual preference received a great turnout.
A coffeehouse held in the beginning of December increased member turnout and enabled AI to show students unfamiliar with the organization a video that showed exactly what AI does.
Semanick said he would like the organization to keep growing. "With growth, hopefully (AI would) be able to do more and more that benefited human rights around the world," he said.