Blogs

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Baltimore, my hometown, probably knows the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America, is not healthy. The thought of Fells Point on a humid night in July or August wouldn’t be complete without the ubiquitous smell of the harbor after a storm, when all of the trash has been washed toward shore. It’s fairly innocuous, just present if you take the time to notice. However, for a few weeks of summer 2007, the smell wasn’t just present, it was overwhelming. Massive die-offs lead to hundreds of decaying fish crowding Fells Point and the Inner Harbor, the parts of town responsible for tourist revenues, and where my sister worked at the Maryland Science Center.

I have always been interested in language. When I was small, I discovered my love of etymology through vocabulary tests. I realized that I remembered words much more easily if I knew how these words were “built”, so to speak. For instance, the word “decimate” was much easier to memorize when I knew that it basically meant “to kill one in ten” in Latin. Eventually, my love for language grew; so much, that I am probably going to major in one, if not two foreign languages here at Bryn Mawr. So it was very fortunate for me when Professor Grobstein recommended that I

See Minotaur

Or, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Minotaur

CHAPTER ONE

herm

the mutilation of the corpus which bore me

Livejournal entry, 11:26 pm 09/10/2007

I very quietly freaked out when I saw a preview of a show about transsexuals in America at the beginning of freshman year - I happened to be wearing a skirt, and I really wanted to get *out* of the skirt. And now I'm plowing through readings on trans/intersex issues in recent American history and googling all kinds of things, and I'm very quietly freaking out again. And I don't know why. My hypothesis is because I lack a vocabulary to describe my own gender identity, and this sort of thing gets it all stirred up. I suppose the best term is genderqueer, but … I guess I don’t know what I mean by that. I’m not transsexual. I don’t feel like my body is wrong, or that … I mean, I don’t think of myself as a woman, and I don’t like the word woman, but I certainly don’t think of myself as a man, either.

Godly Delusions

A woman with child found an ascetic outside her home, the unkempt 

man dressed in rags appeared to be meditating next to her door steps. 

Understanding his sacred duty she did not dare disturb him, but as the woman 

was coming down the steps her foot slipped, and down she landed on top of 

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, Vonnegut acts as a first-person narrator who tells a story

of the evolution of people from the 20th to the 21st century. Vonnegut’s evolutionary story

mocks the human race, and more specifically the human brain and its intellectual in creating

technological machinery that is almost as useless as the brain.

While the nickname that dubbed Bryn Mawr, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Barnard, Vassar and Radcliffe as the Seven Sisters came around in 1926, the ideals that these seven women’s colleges were founded upon have a much lengthier history. (Horowitz, xvi)   The most basic mission that laid the foundations for the Seven Sisters towards the end of the 19th century was to provide an education in the liberal arts similar if not equal or better than the education that colleges for men provided.  Looking back to the history of women’s rights, at that time women did not yet have the right

“Consumption”, “King’s evil”, and the “white plague”. What do all of these have in common? They are all different names for the disease which we call Tuberculosis today.{1} Something with such threatening name should surely be quite the evil malady. In fact, “14,000 cases [of Tuberculosis, or TB,] were reported in 2005 in the United States”.{2} 14,000 cases? That’s not a terribly huge amount of people compared to the 2.4–3.3 million lives that AIDS claimed that same year. {3} And TB didn’t even kill all 14,000 of those people.

Klinefelter’s syndrome (KS) is a condition that results in boys who have an extra X chromosome in most of their cells. The first documented case was in 1942 and it is the second most common extra chromosome condition, occurring in about 1 out of every 500-1,000 newborn males. Women who have pregnancies after age 35 are slightly more likely to have baby boys with this syndrome. Affected males are often referred to as XXYs or 47s as the average human has 46 chromosomes while those with Klinefelter’s have 47.