Earth Day, Rallies, and Newspaper Clippings

Hello,

It's been a whirlwind couple of days around here. Let me slowly bring you up to speed and try to absorb it all myself:

Yesterday was EARTH DAY. I had no idea until I saw it scrawled on our dry erase board at daycare: "Happy Earth Day! Don't forget to bring home your baby's artwork that he/she may or may not have been forced to create by their teachers who may or may not have done the majority of the work but that we're claiming your babies made!" (Okay, so maybe this isn't really what it said, but c'mon--can a 15-month-old really tie-dye a coffee filter with blue and green paint and then paste it onto a piece of paper? I think not.)


(Via truthdig.)


Anyways, in light of the holiday of our earth, and inspired by FilterForGood, I've decided to seriously think of ways I can become a little more responsible in my lifestyle and maybe even save a couple of trees. What are YOU going to do? I'm dedicated to:

1.) Making sure I really recycle all I can. My roommates and I already do this, but everyone once in awhile I just really don't want to walk all the way to the kitchen to the recycling and instead just end up tossing my old Daily Campus into the trash--no more!

2.) Unplugging my cell phone charger! My mother pleasantly reminds me when I'm home that leaving it plugged in, while not necessarily plugged into my phone, is still using electricity and racking up my parents' electric bill. So when I'm at school (and when she's not around to nag me about it), I often leave it perpetually plugged in, just draining electricity out its empty end--no more!

3.) Bringing my reusable grocery bags with me every time I go grocery shopping. I cannot tell you how many times I just leave them in my room, where they are completely useless, instead of bringing them back down to my car to have them available for the next time I happen to stop at the store. How many plastic bags do I really need?? NO MORE!

So that's that. We'll see how it goes. I guess really, I just need to quit being so darn lazy. My laziness is contributing to the demise of our earth!

Okay, what's next? Oh yeah, how about the fact that I got published in the Hartford Courant yesterday! Hooray! There's nothing more satisfying after months of hard work and weeks of waiting and countless emails between Peter Pach than seeing it finally printed! I woke up late yesterday morning, after 11 hours of sleep in the attempts of fighting off what I thought was strep, and drove to the convenience store down the street before class to purchase all three copies the nice man had in stock. He looked down at my stack of papers I was ready to pay for and said, "Need to read the news three times over, eh?" I didn't even respond. Nothing could get in the way of my good mood yesterday morning. Not even the fact that stopping to buy the papers after sleeping late made me ten minutes late to class. Nope.

(However, the comments left beneath my online article were a bit daunting. Please don't read them. And if you do, make sure to post something supportive of my article! Apparently the drunken kids I speak of in the article were quite offended and felt the need to tell me so.)

((All the great emails and calls and texts though were amazing. I even got an email from a high school teacher I haven't heard from in years! And even President Hogan of UConn said he "wished there were 15,000 other students like me." Um, yeah, definitely makes it all worth it.))

Later in the day, Steph and I met up with her friend Joelle at Take Back the Night, a rally to raise awareness about sexual abuse. It was astounding. It began with speakers and singers and then we held a candlelit procession across campus, chanting things like, "We are women, we are men, together we fight to take back the night!" (Granted, running around in the cold and rain while shouting at the top of my lungs was probably not the best choice for attempting to recover from a terrible cold-flu-strep-like thing.) It was really great, though. I had always heard of it every year but never went, and I'm so glad I did this year. As we marched through the quad of the all-freshmen dorms, many people came down from their rooms and cheered us on. Some ignorant fools shouted out their windows for us to shut up, though. Just like my article, I guess you can't always win. There will always be people against you.

While we were preparing the rally outside the student union, a UConn cop who was going to be driving with us to control traffic said to one of the organizers, "So, how many of you ladies do you expect tonight?" He smirked. He did not take this seriously. This was nothing important to him, he who has probably never considered the peril of being in danger of being raped. The girl who was organizing it looked him dead in the eyes and said, "Ladies? Ladies and men." Foolish UConn cops. I wanted to spit on his shoes.


(Via The Women's Center)

After the procession, we all gathered back in the Student Union for the Speak Out portion of the night, where survivors of sexual abuse were able to come up and tell their story. They said that if after five minutes after a speaker ended no one else had come up, they would end it. I honestly figured that this would happen, that there wouldn't really be that many people there who were sexual abuse victims and that even if there was, not many would actually come up. Boy, was I wrong.

They say 1 in 6 women have been raped. Now I know how truthful that statistic is. Woman after woman, and even a few men, came up to tell their stories. Some smiled to ease their discomfort and nervousness, many sobbed as they told their horror stories of being controlled and raped and put down even by their own boyfriends and husbands, some spoke so quietly we couldn't even hear them. But so many people had stories, and they were all so similar. I was horrified to see so many girls I knew. It made me sick to my stomach, and I didn't even realize that an hour and a half had passed before they had to end the session, without even waiting for a lull in the speakers. One girl who spoke is in a bunch of my classes, and also happens to be a good friend of my roommate's. She's always in our apartment. She came over just the other day to do laundry. She laughs, she's loud, she speaks up in class all the time. And she had a story.

The night that she came over to do laundry, there were six of us in our apartment. At least one then had been raped. The statistic was true, and we didn't even know it. That was so disheartening to realize. It was a really great night, but awfully depressing. And sickening. Steph and I couldn't sleep by the time we got home at 11pm, so we sat up sharing a Tupperware container of cold pasta and trying to process all we had just heard.

I'm really glad I have friends I can talk about things like this with. Steph is always good for that. I'm going to miss her when I graduate and we're not living together anymore.

All in all, yesterday was a difficult, yet encouraging, day.