Author Archives: Allison

Sadness + Dogs

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I remember last semester we had 7 or 8 therapy dogs come in at Appel after dinner, and when I got there I had an old fluffy one to myself. Its trainer told me that dogs need to take breaks after these kind of “events”, that they get overwhelmed by our energy, the way we smell- he explained some science behind it but I just remember feeling extremely guilty. I don’t know how rational  ‘dogs can take our sadness from us and need to rest’ sounds but that’s what it feels like. As someone that’s been dealing with mental health issues for a few years and who has her own kind of therapy dog at home, it’s overwhelming, but overwhelming in a great way, when doing these kind of self-care events because finally, as students we can admit that we’re not OK.

I’d love more events like this, not just before finals or once or twice a semester. And I think these events can have more impact than they currently do. Now they stand as just a small break, not a solution but a band-aid to the stressful environment of Cornell, and to the larger campus-wide mental health issue we keep ignoring.

“Pumpkin Spice is inferior”

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Being able to talk about coffee among college students is the same as knowing how to talk about wine over dinner with 30-somethings. Kind of an important skill. This presentation gave me the vocabulary (a simple dark roast vs. ) and the historical/procedural knowledge of coffee that would give me a leg up at fancy dinner conversations. I honestly had no clue about anything about coffee- I didn’t drink start drinking it until college and my mom just had the regular Folger’s brew in the morning. I couldn’t afford to buy Starbucks when I was in high school like my friends, who went daily and had their super-tailored orders down, and I was always embarrassed that I didn’t understand the difference between a frap and a cap, or what made a macchiato a macchiato. The two Gimme! presenters were really knowledgeable and never got too pretentious about their high-quality coffee (except for the “Pumpkin Spice is inferior” line). I felt like I was given a crash course on everything about coffee

A few of things that were finally cleared up for me yesterday were:

  • you would have to drink twice your body weight in coffee before you’d die from the caffeine amount, but you’d die of overhydration first anyway
  • the coffee bean is a seed inside of the coffee cherry which is form the coffee plant
  • first coffee plant from Ethiopia
  • the current trend of coffee is from Ethiopia too (last year was Kenya)
  • the trend a few years ago was Guatemalan coffee, but they’ve been hit by a coffee rust
  • the plant takes 5 years to grow, which is why it’s so difficult to be a coffee plant farmer because you
  • the reason why Americans like their coffee “like mud” or “earthy” is because we’ve gotten most of our coffee from Brazil, but Brazil has automated pickings (they use machines instead of people to pick the coffee) so when they shake the trees, twigs and dirt fall in with the coffee, which mixes into the taste.
  • coffee isn’t earthy in taste, but is actually light and kind of fruity
  • coffee shouldn’t be roasted past 15 minutes, then it reaches a point where all the flavor is taken out (this is what Dunkin Donuts/Starbucks does)
  • all flavored coffee is coffee that’s over-roasted, then sprayed with chemicals (flavors) and isn’t every of good quality

Finding your way to or from the arts

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When I found out Marshall Curry studied comparative religion for his undergrad, I already felt a connection with the accomplished filmmaker. I came into Cornell as a Fine Arts major, I was going to concentrate in digital media, get an internship at the Whitney for the summer, spend a semester in NYC and Rome, and also find time to finish a Computer Science and Computing in the Arts minor. But now, my sophomore fall semester, I find myself about to transfer in to A&S to complete an Information Science major, PAM and Computer Science minor, and with applications ready for Google and Microsoft. After testing out what I liked my spring semester, I realized I liked coding more than painting; both are honest forms of “creation” but the I realized the first made me more excited than anything else I’ve tried. So I followed what excited me instead of what I knew.

Marshall Curry went from majoring in religion to becoming a filmmaker and winning awards at the Tribeca Film Festival and at the IDA, almost a 180, and a successful 180 at that. I think it’s really inspiring hearing people like him speak because he honestly followed what he was passionate about. I know too many people that are pre-med just because their parents want that future for them, and who have passions elsewhere, in music and in literature, but stifle those passions because they’re not practical, they’re not careers and because they’re not enough. And I think we should put more worth to what makes us happy.

Appreciating Food (+More)

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This was a necessary event to go. Especially now in the midst of prelims and essays and applications and stress- it was a reality check. I was reminded of how lucky I am to be here. I think we all forget how lucky we are everyday to be a student at Cornell, we get caught up in the negative and stay stuck in the bubble, and just forget our place in the bigger picture, in the context of the university, of food scarcity, of privilege.

Cornell Dining is #1 in the state of New York, it’s in the top 8 and 5 across the country, it’s something of honor. While Chef Daniel was raving about our system, I remembered I heard someone complain the other day that his tortellini with artichoke & asiago wasn’t as good as the one he had in Venice. And then I realized that too many people just don’t appreciate what we have here.

Too many people do not eat as well as we do. They don’t get options in hours, in location, in dish; a lot of college students cannot afford to eat, let alone eat as well as we do. It’s a privilege to live in West Campus and eat in these dining halls. I’m not saying there are areas that can be improved and that we should stop complaining (I encourage it!) or forget about the food insecurity students living outside of West Campus face- but we should also remember to be thankful every once in a while. A lot of people crave our place.

Something Necessary

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It was dreary outside. The temperature dropped 10 degrees, it was half sprinkling with odd bursts of wind and the sky was a hazy gray. It didn’t seem like a good day to spend a few hours outside raking leaves.

But the thing is, you don’t do community service because it’s easy or convenient, you do it because it’s necessary. Granted, our job wasn’t backbreaking or particularly hard, just tedious- but tedious and important. Our job was to re-beautify a neglected GIAC area, something necessary for the community; we had to clean up a dirty area and weed the gardens, just so the outside can match the inside, and make kids feel a little bit better about going there after school.

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I think the best part was the last 10 minutes- when the director of GIAC talked to us about why Into the Streets even exists and how important it was that we were there. She thanked us for spending our Sunday afternoon raking leaves and reminded us that the center overworks itself in a lot of ways- there are a lot of needs in the community that need to be met and a lot of the small things, like fall maintenance, get overlooked. And that’s where we come in. It’s our job to help in any way we can.

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Holistic and Honest

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The panel cleared up a lot of the confusions I had with environmental concerns, a topic seemingly so broad that it’s difficult to come up with a starting talking point in any discussion. Discourse is mostly summarized by the sentiment “global warning is a Bad Thing” and is never laid out in detail about other forms of energy or other sides of the debate about nonrenewable/renewable energy and nonwestern/western policies. Environmental concerns are more than worrying about fossil fuels, but about the effects of all energy consumption, in forms of costs and health. We talked about nuclear energy, and the gray areas of its benefits and disadvantages, and didn’t come to a concrete side. I didn’t know there was a potential of nuclear energy to be renewable (in its waste), and I wasn’t aware of the regulations that go along with each national nuclear energy processes, that also make it more difficult to use and improve.

A really interesting point that was brought up was the issue of capitalism and the natural push towards deregulation of industries, which has lead and is leading to more issues with energy (e.g fracking). Republicans push for the “free market”, to let the market run itself, but economic studies have shown that the free market only works in some instances, it is not in fact the rule.

I appreciated that the three professors admitted to the gray area of environmental policy, that there aren’t definite answers to whether or not renewable or nonrenewable sources of energy are better than others, it’s all about weighing the pros and cons for individual cases, which, like most issues, are subjective.

International Criminal Law: Things I Should Have Known (10/7)

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I was really excited for this cafe series event because I don’t regularly get exposed to introductory law type of information in my course of study- and that’s how I saw this event- a small taste of a law class from a real law professor. Though the event was only an hour, it was dense, it was part lecture and discussion and I gained a lot of law terminology, arguments, logic and cases from it. We talked about the recent accidental bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, and whether or not the event could be considered a war crime. The talk was framed as an essential talk so Cornell students can become informed citizens in the role of criminal law in society.

I really enjoyed how Professor Ohlin gave his discussion- the examples he gave (comic book type, farfetched examples like a giant nuclear bomb) really helped me understand the theoretical concepts of law- How can you understand what is and isn’t proportionate when a comparable event doesn’t exist?

Vital things I learned (and that I should have known earlier):

  • International Criminal Court is less than 15 years old, and negotiations for this tribunal began since after World War II (shows how long any kinds of international government action takes)
  • the U.S. has not joined the ICC, only a part of the United States Security Council
  • presidents have diplomatic immunity- the ICC thinks they trump this law
  • decentralized enforcement of the ICC can be seen as a natural form of international governance, or a weak starting point that’ll form into an individual force
  • US is limited to its own military airpower (e.g. drone strikes) OR arming/training other country’s military (which has not worked) because they’re avoiding an actual war on ground
  • Europe: humanitarian intervention is moral but illegal, which is what going after Assad (Syria) would be, and the opposite of what the US wants to do