Author Archives: Leah

Thoughts on bean juice

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Many of us here in the states have the luxury of not knowing where our food, or any other commodity for that matter, comes from. It is very easy to live in this country and operate as if all the food in the grocery store just materializes there everyday. I know for me personally, my perception of where food comes from falls somewhere in the middle. There were plenty of small, local farms in my area who sold their products independently at farmer’s markets or their own farm stands, but large commercial farms that supply grocery store chains have never been on my radar. It was really interesting to hear Mr. Lemnios speak about some of the farms where Sun Coffee Roasters gets its coffee, but also how he came to develop Sun Coffee Roasters.

I really liked how honest he was about how when he initially got into coffee roasting, he was not so interested in sustainability or making sure the farmers supplying his company were paid fairly but after learning more about the industry he decided to make sustainability and fair trade the center of his company. It really demonstrated what he was talking about when he said that people don’t care what you’re selling, they care about why you’re selling it. To me it seems like Mr. Lemnios has a pretty good why. He very clearly cares deeply about the farms and farmers who supply his roaster, and on top of that cares enough about the environment to invest in developing a zero emission roasting plant. To me it really shows that it is entirely possible as a businessman to be interested in both ethical sources and sustainability without compromising profits or success. This is why I think it is so important to be an informed buyer, whether that buyer is an individual or an institution, and whenever possible buy from ethical and sustainable companies. We know that such businesses are possible, so it is important for the buyer to demand these business models to be the norm.

 

Some strong feelings, a cursory understanding, and further questions

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As I braced myself for what promised to be a very intense Rose Cafe, I thought I would reflect a little bit about my stance on torture. Just as Dr. Cheesman said at some point, you cannot enter any academic work pretending that you are not biased at all, so I figure it would be good to start with my own biases toward the subject. My stance on torture is not exceptionally nuanced. I hate it. I hate it as a concept, as a practice, how it is portrayed and glorified in movies, and most of all how so many people see it as a topic that is up for debate because in my mind, there should be no debate when it comes to torture. Like I said, whole lot of bias, not a lot of nuance. So coming from that mindset, I was very interested in going to this Rose Cafe to try to get a more nuanced, academic perspective on a topic about which I had very strong feelings but very cursory knowledge. I was delighted to hear from both Dr. Cheesman and Pornpen Khongkachonkiet and I think the conversation really worked to show how Dr. Cheesman’s theoretical, academic approach fits into Ms. Khongkachonkiet’s practical, activist work and vice versa. Overall I think it was an excellent cafe on a vital, if intense, subject.

I would be very interested to investigate the phenomenon of torture more, not just as a tool of the state or of the military (which I understand to be very modern institutions), but how torture has existed as a human phenomenon across time and space. Dr. Cheesman mentioned this briefly when he discussed how there is a perception that torture has decreased since the Middle Ages when in reality it has just gotten “cleaner”. I think by looking at Dr. Cheesman’s theoretical framework for the implications and motivations for torture at the institutional level, it may be possible to then ask the question “Why is torture even a phenomenon in the first place?” This very broad question may get into some sociological/psychological/anthropological areas that aren’t entirely relevant to either Dr. Cheesman’s or Pornpen Khongkachonkiet’s work, but coming from my little corner of existence it is an important one because in many ways I still cannot wrap my mind around it. I found it exceptionally interesting when Dr. Cheesman was discussion how the question “Does torture work?” only serves to garner the answer “Yes.” My followup question would be “What then does one mean by ‘work’?” because there seems to be an awful lot of evidence that in terms of torture as an interrogation tool used to gain information, torture does not “work”. But perhaps that assumes interrogation is the only motive behind torture in the first place, diverting the attention from more pressing questions like “Who does torture serve and how effective is it as serving them?” From the talk, I gathered that as an interrogation tool it may not be effective, but as a tool of the state/military to establish or maintain power and control it is very effective. In that regard it does “work”. So I would be very interesting in investigating further the politics of the questions we ask when it comes to torture and what questions we maybe should be asking instead.

Thoughts on The Professor

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What struck me most about The Professor was how through the accounts of his students, and even through the scenes of Cheng Man-Ching practicing himself or helping his students, you really got the sense of how special this man really was. His ability to connect with his students on such a deep spiritual and emotional level even across a language barrier was evident in how Tai Chi for so many of his students became a lifelong practice. It is a relatively recent understanding in Western medicine and psychology that caring for the mind benefits the body, and caring for the body benefits the mind. This is the basis for many Eastern philosophies and religions. From yoga and meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism, to Tai Chi in Taoism, there is an understanding that exercising the body is simultaneously an exercise in spiritualism. In terms of Western psychology, there is that understanding just in a less spiritual sense. Exercising the body is known to help the mind by reducing stress, but it it rarely talked about in terms of a spiritual experience. At one point in the video, someone said that those practicing Tai Chi and really focusing on the movements and postures don’t even realize that they are meditating. That really struck me as a key point in the video. It seemed like a lot of the students were drawn to Tai Chi as a new, unique form of exercise, but stuck with it because of the immense spiritual benefits they discovered along the way. I think in a lot of ways there is a tendency in the west to not trust tradition when it comes to medicine or understanding how the body and mind works, and while Western medicine and psychology certainly has developed a lot over the last century, there is a reason much of Eastern medicine and psychology has remained relatively unchanged in the last 5000 years.

I found that The Professor was similar in many ways to Brilliant Moon, a documentary on Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a Vajrayana Buddhist master who was instrumental in the preservation of Tibetan Buddhism after the Chinese invaded Tibet. The practices and philosophies behind Tai Chi seem very similar to a lot of Buddhist practices and philosophies. Additionally at their cores, both deal with how tradition is preserved in an ever changing world. I would highly recommend Brilliant Moon to anyone who enjoyed The Professor or who is interested in Asian philosophies. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed The Professor and learning about an aspect of Asian philosophy and practice that I hadn’t known much about before!

The Transatlantic Series and community building

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In case you couldn’t tell by everything about me, I am not the most athletic person. In fact, if you placed me in a room with a randomly selected group of people, there is a pretty good chance that I would even be the least athletic person in that room. Despite my best efforts (and my father’s, bless his heart), I have never found any great passion or aptitude for doing sports, and with the exception of hockey I am generally not that keen on watching sports either. (I’m excluding the Olympics here. I rally hard for the Olympics.) That said, 20 years on I am more or less sports literate in that I understand basic rules of most of the popular sports and only sometimes forget that the Superbowl is a thing until the day of the Superbowl. I am not track and field literate. My knowledge of the sport before the talk began and ended with “People run various distances, jump various heights, and throw various things”. My strategy whenever I had to run a mile in gym class was to jog the straightaways and walk the corners of the track field. Now that all the track and field people are cringing and/or laughing and/or shaking their heads, let’s move on to my thoughts on Mr. Paul Wilcox’s talk. All of said thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt because, as I’ve mentioned, I know nothing.

What interested me most about the talk when I read about it was first the title because I have a weakness for talking about life and world views, and second was the history of the Transatlantic Series, something I hand’t even heard of before the talk. How do you get nerds to a sports talk? History! It was really interesting to hear about the series from Mr. Wilcox who is clearly very passionate and invested in it. I thought it was incredible how this competition has survived through two world wars, the Depression, and countless other tests of time. I think what makes this series so resilient to the winds of change is precisely what Mr. Wilcox mentioned or alluded to multiple times in his talk: the Transatlantic Series isn’t just about track and field. It is an opportunity for athletes and coaches to experience something new, to make connections with people who share their passion, to travel to new places, and above all a way for people to use their sport to expand their world view. From competing with members of a team usually considered their rivals, to connecting with student athletes from another country, to seeing the long lasting effect this opportunity has from people like Mr. Wilcox and Dr. Hill, the Transatlantic Series is about much more than track and field (though I don’t think that bit should be discounted either). It has very clearly built a strong community and as such has been able to continue the tradition for many years.

Wait, so Brazil isn’t just Rio and then the Amazon?

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I really enjoy Rose Cafes where I get to hear about another country from somebody who is from there because they always debunk misconceptions I have about said country. The biggest one for me with this one was the ecological diversity of Brazil. I knew that Brazil was a very large country, but I still somehow assumed that most of it was tropical rainforest? I don’t know why either, so don’t ask. The point is it was cool to hear Andre Simores talk about his work in different areas of Brazil and show pictures of said areas that were very different from the Brazil I had in my mind before the event.

It was also cool to hear him talk about the difference between colleges and universities in the US versus Brazil. I thought it was interesting that for Brazilian students, public universities are the top tier universities, but a large number of said students went to private high schools. It seems to be the reverse of what it is in the US, where most high schoolers attend public universities but there is a conception that private universities are better than public universities. I also thought it was interesting that the implications of this mean that as more private high school students fill up spots in the free public universities, students from public high schools who may have a harder time affording tuition have a hard time getting into the free public universities. Simores also made it sound like most students don’t live in university housing.

All in all, it was cool to hear about Brazil and Brazilian colleges from someone who lives there because it brings a perspective I had never heard before.

Some (mixed) thoughts on cities and stars

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Having been left at the station by the La La Land hype train, I was excited to be able to see it at Cornell Cinema with Rose House. It had come highly recommended to me personally, so even though I was aware of some of the criticisms it had garnered, I was fully expecting to thoroughly enjoy it. And I did! Sort of. I think. Maybe.

I’ll start with the easy stuff because I am clearly still unable to speak about this movie coherently. La La Land is visually stunning. The cinematography was really cool (the opening scene with the camera moving through the cars on the highway stands out) and the colors were beautiful. To me, the use of color really added to the whole romanticized and fantastical mood of the film. Additionally, it was really cool to see the traditional Hollywood musical style of movie applied to a contemporary setting. I think the film did a really good job of staying true to that old Hollywood style, but bringing it into a more modern era. In my find, the whole film is about the dangers of romanticization, so placing the film in that colorful, shiny, old Hollywood setting really speaks to the themes of the film.

The tricky part for me is the plot and the characters. For most of the film, I remember thinking “Wow, I am really not enjoying this as much as I think I should and I can’t pinpoint exactly why.” I’ve had quite a lot of time to think about it, including a chat about it over lunch with one of my friends back home who I consider the biggest movie person I know, and I still can’t pinpoint exactly why. For starters, I think the plot wasn’t anything new or exceptional. The whole young, broke idealists trying to make their dreams come true in a big city trope didn’t shock or amaze me. It wasn’t bad, I just didn’t think it was groundbreaking. And I didn’t really like the characters. I don’t think you were necessarily supposed to like them, but I do think you were supposed to at least find them interesting, which I didn’t. And not just because Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s singing was strictly passable (although that’s a pretty big movie musical pet peeve of mine. Like, go for the trained vocalists not the big name actors please). I don’t know, something about the characters just didn’t captivate me.

I was talking to my friend about the ending, and we both agreed that it was kind of weird that they both seemed to get everything they wanted at the end. He thought it was even weirder that they got everything EXCEPT each other, but that point actually redeemed a lot of the movie for me. The whole scene at the end where Mia and her husband end up in Sebastian’s successful jazz club and we see the crazy love montage of Mia and Sebastian moving through movie sets of the story as if they had stayed together and ended up just as successful really was the best part in my opinion. Because the whole scene is so romanticized and fantastical that you realize that the reality where Mia and Sebastian could have had it all and had each other is just that, romantic and fantastical. And the smile they exchange at the very end lets the audience know that they know that too. The fact is that they could only pursue their career dreams when they were NOT together. Take that as you will, but to me that really cemented the movie in my mind and is what made me finally come to the conclusion that yes, I liked La La Land.

The history of nutrition

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I was interested in attending this Rose Cafe because I love history and was intrigued by the topic. I am not terribly knowledgable about the Great Depression in general, and I had certainly never considered it through the lens of nutrition and public health. Going into it, I had seen the photos of bread lines and was aware in general that the Great Depression greatly affected the ability of many to afford sufficient food, but I was not aware of the responses to that crisis and how they affected the way we think about nutrition today. Ziegelman pointed out that much of the malnutrition crisis was addressed in the emerging field of home economics and that the research done by home economists drew heavily on biology and chemistry to come to practical solutions. The goal was to find recipes and food sources that were both cheap and nutritious and to educate the public about the importance of proper nutrition. The research conducted had a lasting impact by making people more informed about the foods they eat and the affects it has on their bodies.

I was most interested in the point she made connecting the home economics movement to improve nutrition with that of the temperance movement. The diets proposed to combat malnutrition were bland and simple. I would have guessed that this was merely because when faced with a food crisis, taste can no longer be the priority, but Ziegelman pointed out that this bland, simple food also was a product of temperance ideals which saw excessive pleasure as harmful. I think much of this utilitarian mindset surrounding food continues in many ways in American culture today. As was mentioned in the talk, the most notable holdover from this mindset is the fact that many people eat on the go or only sit down to eat for a very short time. Ours is not a culture of long, drawn out meals. Additionally, this point reminded me of all of the times my not American friends have poked fun at American foods, especially for having no spice or flavor. I had never considered the historical precedent for why American foods seem bland to some and Ziegelman’s Rose Cafe offered some potential insight into this!

Art for your own sake

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As someone who tends to lean more towards the left side of the brain when viewing art (I love art museums but I always seem to want to contextualize the pieces within the time period/culture in which it was produced), I was really excited about Nicholas Carbonaro’s exhibit because it provided the opportunity to hear from the artist himself about the art we would be viewing. For me, this is one of the biggest pieces missing from art museums because for me art is a conversation. I’ve heard artists refuse to talk too much about their work because they want the viewer to come to their own conclusions. Now that is all well and good, and I certainly have no problems with artistic interpretation, but I think when you aren’t given ANY context, art becomes a one-sided conversation, which we all know is really boring. So for me, getting to look at some art and then engage with the artist about it is really ideal because it fills in that context.

My favorite series featured in the exhibit is the set of portraits done in ink. When I was looking at them before the Q&A, I wasn’t so enthused by them. Somebody asked why he seems to focus on the asymmetry of the human face, especially in regards to eyes, and he responded that the series was a set of portraits he did from memory of people he saw on the New York City subway (I was already hooked) and that the asymmetry is his way of expressing how the real world sees the real you. It speaks to the fact that nobody’s face is perfectly symmetrical, yes, but on a deeper level it speaks to the reality that life does not come with photoshop. You cannot control how the world sees you coming home after work or school on the subway in the same way that you can control how the world sees you through social media, a point that Mr. Carbonaro also brought up in answering this question. I, and anybody who has stumbled upon me napping in Uris, can definitely attest to this. But at the same time, while this idea certainly puts a damper on “classical” beauty (whatever that means), I don’t think it’s fair to say that this reality is a denial of beauty altogether. When you look at the portraits as people, when you try to imagine what they must look like “in real life”, beautiful is probably not the first word that comes to mind, but the creativity and style of art certainly is. And furthermore I contend that these portraits do not mock this perhaps at times ugly reality, but rather celebrate it as a part of life and the human condition. These portraits do not read as satire to me personally, but rather as a playful celebration of what it means to be and look human. I think it also reflects what I was mentioning before about art being a conversation and the relationship between context and interpretation. At the end of the day, there is always a limit to the control you have over how people see you. Even if you are constantly putting your best, most beautiful foot forward and every candid photo of you is Instagram worthy, people are still going to interpret that image differently. And this is not something to be afraid of or something to be seen as bad. That’s just how communication works.

What I appreciated most about Carbonaro’s art (and Carbonaro himself for that matter) was that everything about it was raw, real, and unapologetic. Even before I spoke to him and heard him talk about the exhibit briefly, you could tell that he was an artist who created visuals that spoke to him in whatever medium spoke to him. I loved how he encouraged everyone to seek creative outsets without inhibition and I am hoping that I will be able to make it to his workshop later this month. Of course he is a very talented artist who loves his craft, but he is in no way pretentious about it. What I got out of the reception was an idea of art for art’s sake, or perhaps even better, art for your own sake. Hopefully I can carry that inspiration with me for the rest of the semester!

Some thoughts on life and meaning

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It took me a week to write this, not because I forgot/procrastinated (at least not this time), but because I genuinely had no idea what to say. Dr. Hill’s Rose Cafe left me speechless. It felt like my brain was buzzing with a million thoughts, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on anything specific. I immediately texted my partner saying, “I’m freaking out. I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s not bad, but oh my god I’m freaking out.” I was not very coherent then and I’m not sure I’ll be able to be very coherent now, but we’ll see. Ze Frank made a video in 2012 called “Crushing Words” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ9e32MNEOk) that sums how I was feeling after the cafe well. Pretty much everything that Dr. Hill said that night has been added to my list of crushing words, including his challenge to write about what gives our lives here meaning.

This prompt was crushing for me because, truth be told, most of my time at Cornell I have not been able to answer this prompt. Like so many others, when I started college I hit a wall of depression and anxiety unlike anything I had experienced previously. Without the tools or prior experience to handle mental health challenges, their effects were crippling at times. My first year it mostly affected my social life. There were times I quite literally hid in my room from the people I had begun to make friendships with. The dining hall was my nightmare and I skipped meals to avoid seeing people. I would even go to a different floor of my dorm to use the restroom. But even though my social life was mostly nonexistent, I held desperately on to my academics and finished my first year well academically. This year however, I have found that even though my social life is improving, my mental health now affects my academic performance. I did not finish last semester strongly and was very nearly placed on leave this semester. Though I was determined that this semester would be better, I’ve had a pretty rocky start. There are times when I can’t get out of bed at all. I’ve gone without eating for days. More than once I have wanted nothing more than to pack up my room and go home. The bottom line is that most of my time at Cornell has been spent feeling inadequate, be it socially or academically. I am also acutely aware that mine is not a unique experience. I outline my struggles here not because I feel that nobody would understand, but because I feel that all too many people understand all too well and I think it is vital that this becomes an open, authentic dialogue not limited to mental health awareness events on campus (which always feel forced to me personally). So, given that context for my time at Cornell, how the hell do I find meaning here?

In many ways, I’m still trying to find the answer to that question. I’m getting help for my mental health issues and learning how to prioritize myself above the self I think I am expected to be. I’m trying to get back into the things that made me happy before life got in the way, like art and writing. I’m learning that no aced prelim or highly praised essay is going to make my soul full and that a getting a B or even *gasp* a C in a course is a small price to pay for my personal health and happiness. I’m learning to extend to myself the same patience and kindness that I try to give others. I say learning because I haven’t figured it out yet. I suppose what keeps me searching for and creating meaning here, what keeps me “keeping on” as Dr. Hill would say, is that even though it feels like depression and anxiety have stripped me of everything that I thought made me me, it has not been able to touch one thing. I am sure with every fiber of my being that life is beautiful. I know in my heart of hearts that I love life and that creating meaning for one’s own life is the greatest way to express that love. I don’t always love my life. Far from it. I think it is more than fair to say that for the past several months my life has been really, really ugly and I know that those ugly bits make it hard to create meaning. But I fight that ugliness because I know that a beautiful life is worth fighting for. I search for meaning because I know that my life is meaningful, even if I lose sight of that sometimes. I keep on loving life even when I hate mine because goddammit life can be a crazy bitch sometimes, but boy is it breathtaking when you really stop and think about it.