Author Archives: Matt Steffanetta

CAPS

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Professor Mertha is one of my favorite professors here. Hilarious, vibrantly knowledgeable, and–as he told us the first day of class last semester when i took a class with him–has a pepper on ratemyprofessor.

I’ve always had an interest in Asia. When i took CAPS 3403 with Mertha, that interest became something like an obsession. There is so much to be learned, studied, and enjoyed through China. Even the Chinese language is great.

What was fun and fresh about this talk however, is that it wasnt all about China. The Cambodian Experience of the Khmer Rouge was brought into light.

Mertha is really interesting in the sense that he has such a bank of analogies. In this lecture, he told the story of when he interviewed, in Chinese, Pol Pot’s cook-turned-China ambassador.

After the lecture was over, I went up to Mertha and asked him about Beijing, which he is familiar and where I’ll be for two months this summer. He told me of the Chinese War Museum, which should have a connection to the Khmer Rouge as well as China at large. I’m pretty excited to check it out, and pretty happy to attend another one of his talks after my time in his class has elapsed.

CiLo

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I became a part of CiLo this year when the Student Assembly committee was formed by a great friend of mine, Milicent Kastenbaum. We do things to better community relations between Ithacans and Cornellians, and to try to kind of gray that very bolded line by doing events like this one. Most Cornellians barely even think about the City they live in, but it really is an astonishingly vibrant community and great place to live.

That said, it does have its issues. And there are issues that pertain to students, and there are issues that pertain to the community at large. Our group wanted to aim for a student based discussion, but at the same time acknowledge the big changes that are coming (Related to the new drug program here).

The panel was great. Plenty of great questions were asked and plenty of even better answers were given. It seems a big step to try to prove to students that the government is actually trying to help fix the housing market, or to help boost the economy in the area, or to give incentive to landlords to renovate their homes.

The best part about these events however, is that after they’re over, you can actually reach out to the community to get a sense on their situation, and how they feel about anything mentioned in the talk. There are always two sides to these issues, and there is a huge population in Ithaca that some people barely know about.

sexual assault awareness

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It’s hard to talk about sexual assault. Kate Harding made it a little bit easier.

Kate was refreshing and interesting, she brought her own experiences together to shed some light on sexual assault on college campuses. One interesting thing she said was a study, where plenty of universities were asked “is sexual assault prevalent across college campuses” to which most college administrators said yes. Then, when the administrators were asked if they thought sexual assault was prevalent across their own college, most said no.

Also, we talked about a “red zone” where there’s the acclimating time for new college freshmen. Generally, the most rapes and sexual assaults happen within that O-week period, so it was interesting to learn how some universities are trying to combat the problem.

chhkchhkchhkchhk

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That was the sound our pack leader made as we stopped at a group of trees on our nature walk. How surprising it was to hear that exact noise also come from about 10 birds in the vacinity. Supposedly, the noise that the guide made was a call birds use to signal that a predator is in the general vicinity.

I thought it was SO COOL. how the HECK could a person make a noise and then little birds (which i originally thought were fluttering, bumbling idiots) take that noise, replicate it, and actually have a predetermined reason for using it.

Also, do humans have these sounds, native to the ear and engrained in our brains, to mean something specifically? Is “Ouch” a intrinsic sound of the human feeling of being injured? or is screaming a universal sound of being afraid and alerting others of some kind of scary thing?

Quite an interesting walk, and quite a nice day. The inside of the lab was super spunky too, and i highly recommend a trip for any cornellian to it at least once.

 

as-salamu alaykum

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Before the night of Dukhtar, I had never seen a movie in Arabic and knew little to nothing about the plight that Dukhtar revealed. But holy bananas, life is so different in different areas of the world. A little girl is to be wedded to a warlord to unite two clans. And no, this isn’t a Game of Thrones plot, this is something that feasibly happens today. Dukhtar was scarily real. It made me angry, it made me upset, but it also made me wonder about civilizations and institutions different from our own.

Now barring not only the fact that this marriage was one that was forced to a girl that was underage, which is pretty bad concept in itself, but also the fact that the man she was to marry was a warlord, the abundance and success rates for arranged marriages are pretty cool. Similar belief systems and family backing are instrumental to making any marriage work, and arranged ones start with this right of the bat. With divorce rates around 4% and arranged marriages consisting of around 55% of all marriages, this phenomenon would be one that would be really interesting to dive deeper into.

also, the title means “peace be upon you,” a standard arabic greeting.

identity

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How interesting it is to look at the impression of a land from a lens not your own.

To see Cuba is to see the conglomeration of Cold-War era newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and reiterations through high-school history classes.

But to really see Cuba, is to see the perspectives of Cubans, and of those who left Cuba but have their roots still touching the island.

Film and arts; sculptures, pictures;

All add to the culture of Cuba, add to the collective voice, and help to form a truer picture of the country that hid behind the curtain of the Cold War for a lifetime.

:’}

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Inside out is a movie of plenty of feels.

Besides the plot and interesting philosophies of psychology that the film dove into, the talk at the end with professor Tamara was very interesting. There is science present throughout Inside Out, an interesting matrix of different psychological ideas that were actually founded when Disney consulted with real psychologists. The film touched on much more than a simple coming-of-age story usually reveals; and the viewer leaves the movie thinking about the fact that he/she is also heavily influenced by emotions, and memories are colored and occasionally tainted by emotions.

Additionally, in the movie, the emotion boards of the parents were also introduced, with different emotions leading the HQ. For the mother, it was sadness; for the father, anger; and for the daughter (until the ambiguous end) joy.

My question to the reader would be: what is the head of your emotions? And in order, how much sway does each emotion have over you?

holes

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with angry cadences, sharp rhythms, and harmonic irregularity this magical group of four told the ripped emotional level behind the impression of a story on a person. The feeling, the sway created a tangible aura of feeling. Dissonant mercurial anti-harmonies rumbled by turns scraping and screeching, clanking and clinking. The swoon and slither of the quartet was at once an un-dead twitch, a hypnotized swirl, and and electric eel. Following the tides of change, the antagonist of the queued bows pulling to fire at the ready and embezzled the mind of its proper sultan. Envy, pure rage, trust, and nerves all entered stage left as the man’s physical being overwhelmed the listener with the man’s physiology. I wanted–i don’t know–to faint? It was like if great pressure on your chest coded as feeling itchy all over the skin. But somehow still i was quite completely transfixed by that feeling. it was dark and erotic and it was eating glass. The feeling transfixed me, and as i got dinner with my visiting mother, the feeling decrescendo’d and subsided. the feint and the pale removed itself to a warmer shade, and i felt better.