ANDREA OJEDA ENTERTAINMENT JOURNALISM
Austin
FORASTERO Est 2015
ST. EDWARD'S UNIVERSITY | FALL 2015 | EAKMAN|
FALL 2015
A Letter From the Editor This is the fifth time I try to write this letter. Every time I sit down to write, I can't find the words to express how beautiful the experience writing and creating this portfolio has been. This past semester was difficult and there were many times when I questioned why I had taken on this class, this assignment and this English minor, knowing I had a full course load, job, and family responsibilities.
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Now that I have finished this project, I understand why I couldn't let myself quit. I began this project writing about nerd culture in Austin, but soon realized I was supposed to be writing about something deeper. Reflecting on the greater themes in my work, I can't say this portfolio is about art or music or movies because my topic transcends all of these "beats."
What unifies my work is an honest exploration of my world as a millennial. It is a coming of age story, of sorts, examining youth, dating, millennial culture and trends; more than anything my work explores, how we continue to as humans. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS AUGUST - DECEMBER 2015
The Review/5/ The Profile/ 9/ The Personal Essay/ 13/ The Desert Island Playlist/ 17/ The Scene/ 21/ The Feature/23/ The Query/27/
3001 S. Congress Ave. Austin, TX 78704 281.856.8902 / aojeda2@stedwards.edu
WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/ANDREA.OJEDA.75
FALL 2015
WHAT I LEARNED PLAYING MAGIC
I don’t play Magic. In fact, when a friend told me about Magic night at ‘Dragon’s Lair’, a local comic book store, I thought he meant magic night, as in Penn & Teller or David Copperfield. Although there was some awkward clarification, I got pretty interesting insight into the world of creatures, spells, land, mana, all of which still feels like a foreign language. I know what you’re thinking; I was confused too. As David Greenwald, from the Rolling Stones puts it, Magic is a “cross between chess, poker, and Game of Thrones: players compile a deck from hundreds of potential cards, with lands (“mana”- generating resource cards), fantastical creatures (your army), enchantments, and other spells, all imagined with Magic’s unique mythology.” A two-player card game, players face-off as “planes-walkers,” allpowerful beings that summon creatures to cast spells and enchantments. Each player starts with 20 life points, and the point of the game is to attack the opponent, using the various cards, until a player has zero life points left.
After 22 years, Magic: The Gathering continues to have a huge following. Annually, more that 11,000 people gather in Las Vegas for the Grand Prix, the largest competitive tournament in gaming history. This is a huge industry, with cards valued up to $20,000 dollars. Across the United States, comic book stores and other venues host weekly tournaments charging entry fees anywhere from seven to 15 dollars. In an effort to understand why this card game continues to attract players, and maybe even find a great new spot to test out my own skills, I went to a few Magic tournaments here in Austin. The first tournament I attended was at Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy in North Austin. This huge comic book store holds $12 weekly Magic draft tournaments where the prize for the winner is three new card packs. Other venues offer cash prizes and trade-ups for valuable cards. According to Jaime Gonzalez, the store manager at Dragon’s Lair, every weekly tournament attracts anywhere from 3040 people.
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Most competitive Magic tournaments are drafts, meaning players must build the decks they use in the game from sealed card packs provided at the tournaments. Deck-building is an important skill to play Magic well. This is the part where players choose cards that work well together, one type of card will unlock a special power in another type of card, until s/he has a cohesive, powerful deck. To begin the draft, players are randomly assigned to pods, the section they play in, and pass around the pre-packaged decks, selecting one card from the pile and passing the rest to the right. Once players finish building their decks, they are assigned an opponent in their section and play. The player who wins two out of the three rounds advances in the tournament. When I got to Dragon’s Lair, the floor staff greeted and pointed me toward the back of the store where a crowd had gathered around waiting for pod assignments. I paid my $12 entry and joined the anxious crowd. People kept checking the side of a Coke machine by the register, and on the advice of a burly man in his 40, I checked it too, realizing that was where the pod assignments would be posted. As I sat in a room of about 30 very chatty people, I noticed a few things. For one, everyone, well, mostly everyone, was a white man spanning a wide range of backgrounds. I met one man who was the Vice President of a bank and another who had just dropped out of school to join a “ collective of other artistically inclined individuals.” They were planning on buying land to start a sustainable farm out in West Austin.
I had done some investigating into Magic in Austin and realized at Dragon’s Lair, I would meet a wide variety of people. Dragon’s Lair is like the Walmart of the Austin Magic scene; everyone goes there at some point, no matter who s/he is. Out in Central Austin there is another popular venue dedicated to Magic seven days a week called Pat’s Games. A renovated house, Magic began here when the owner, Pat, realized Austin needed a casual venue where players could gather. A veteran Magic player, Pat also hosts Friday Night Draft at $12 a tournament. The prizes here range from card packs, store credit, or card exchanges. Although both venues offer Magic, they attract different types of people.
“The more you practice,” said Jaime. “Come back and see us!”
Unlike Dragon’s Lair, Pat’s Games draws a larger percentage of students. There were a few older people there, but the general vibe was 20-year-olds. “We attract a different crowd,” Pat says. “It’s a smaller place to gather so people here expect a type of community. I have regulars.” This sense of community is great for regulars, but while there, I felt like I was intruding. It was intimidating to be in an environment where everyone seemed to know one another and was focused entirely on the game. It didn’t help that I had embarrassingly limited knowledge about what I was doing.
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At the Lair, I was asked twice about how long I had been playing and why I started playing. People openly ranted about their experiences with bad luck, having poor decks, and flooding a game (which means a player can’t draw the right card to cast any spells). The staff could tell I was new and offered insights, tips, and even peanuts. They encouraged me to come back, referencing the 10,00 hour rule, even after I lost every match. “The more you practice,” said Jaime. “Come back and see us!” I gathered that Pat’s Games is the “antiestablishment” in the Austin Magic scene. It’s the place in Austin people hang out to just play Magic. There are no comic books, snacks, or other board games going on; it’s all about the game. Maybe it’s a younger crowd thing; everyone there knows what s/he is doing and doesn’t seem to want to stop and explain much.
There were several times at the Lair where I asked what a card meant, if I had enough to cast a spell, if he really had to beat me in less than four minutes. Dragon’s Lair felt more successful in creating an inclusive environment for all players, new and old. And isn’t that the point? Magic has continued to be popular for the same reason beer pong has: tradition, competition, and fraternity. These are all concepts that make life interesting. The collecting, trading, strategy conversation, and deck building was how many Magic players spent time in between matches, and that seemed to be everyone’s favorite part. People talked, laughed, and shared stories about the greatest games they had played. If you’re not doing this, according to a Dragon Lair frequenter, you’re “missing out.” So, if you are a seasoned Magic player looking to be challenged, Pat’s Games is the place to be Friday evening, but as Dragon’s Lair is more accustomed to directing anxious, lost people, I’ll keep trying my luck there.
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DONNY CATES; NERDS, TATOOS, AND SPIDERMAN And at 2:33, Donny Cates rolls into an interview scheduled for 2:00. “I’m late because I’m an asshole,” he says. Covered in tattoos, wearing a black Heavy Metal t-shirt, and colored sneakers, Cates stands at the front of the room and proceeds to have a conversation with himself. “Right so how this usually goes is I tell you this weird story about how I got into comics. And then you kids ask me a ton of questions. Right on, so I, uh, I learned to read using comics…” For the next hour, Cates fires off answers to everything related to his career, his life, his dreams, and struggles. Everything from his favorite comic book, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to which he challenges anyone to a trivia-off, to a story about how he lied his way into leading the Macy’s Day Parade Spiderman float.
“I was interning at Marvel at the time, and they had asked me to help with the Spiderman float. And you have to take these 'float classes' that teach you how to do it. So I get there at 3 am, and there is this dude walking around asking people if they had gotten 'float certified.' So when he asks me, I lie and say yes, I did take the classes. And the guy is like great you’re leading the float because none of these other people took the class. So there I am BS-ing my way around New York City.” He chuckles, again to himself. “So anyway kids, point of the story is lying gets you what you want.” This has now been the second time in the span of 10 minutes Cates tells a story with the take away “deception will get you ahead.” There was also the time he lied his way into an internship. “So it turns out, you are only allowed to intern at Marvel if you are enrolled in school. And I had accidentally dropped out. By not registering for classes. So I got my dean to call and tell Marvel ‘Sure he’s still enrolled!’”
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It turns out, Cates is no stranger to failure, and “accidentally forgetting.” You see, Donny Cates used to run a local Austin comic book chain until he “ran it into the ground.” Having been a comic fanatic his whole life, he decided he wanted to have comics continue to be a part of his life. Cates enrolled in SCAD (Savannah School of Art and Design) to study Sequential Art and quickly discovered he would never be as good as any of the other students in the same major. So he dropped the major. And eventually dropped out of SCAD. So how did this frantic man, covered in tattoos, who was 30 minutes late to this interview come to write a critically acclaimed comic book, Buzzkill?
At this point in the interview, Cates trails off, and for a moment, I can’t trace his fleeting thoughts. “At first, I wasn’t thinking about myself,” Cates says. “In a November, I’ll be a year sober.” Without missing another beat, Cates jumps right back into telling his frantic story. The comic follows Ruben, a superhero whose powers depend on his consumption of drugs or alcohol. In order to have powers, Ruben has to get drunk. And he is a mean, angry, violent drunk. He is such a horrible drunk that super villains actually want him to go to rehab. Ruben battles issues with depression, and isolation. He is hurt by his girlfriend, his father, his best friend. Ruben gets it. He is a person, despite his abilities, struggling, just like the rest of us.
It all started at a comic convention. A friend of Cates’ had been pitching a comic to a few publishers. At the convention he noticed a man standing with a microphone, walked up to him, and said, “I’m supposed to be famous. Can you help me with that?” Everyone laughs. The friend pitches him the comic, and it all takes off from there. Cates had asked another friend, Rez, “lead drummer of a really RAD band,” for ideas to pitch to Black Horse, the publisher from the convention. Rez sat on the question for a few months and texted Cates one night, “dude who gets his powers from drugs and alcohol.”
Cates struggled with how to write this story. He wanted to make the story real, thinking about what would actually happen to someone who was struggling with alcohol. You know, when your friend gets drunk in the dorms, you kids are in college, ya’ll know what dorms are right, well that’s funny. But when someone is dying because of addiction, that’s not funny,” he said. Cates went to AA meetings to make sure his character’s experiences were as relatable as possible. He thought often about how Breaking Bad, AMC’s critically acclaimed series about a chemistry teacher’s ascent to drug kingpin status following a terminal cancer diagnosis, had dealt with a delicate topic.
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“We were really stuck on making it a real experience. Someone who is actually an alcoholic would know if the story was disingenuous. We didn’t want people to think we were making fun of it.” Cates found tremendous success because the story is atypical of most comic narratives. Comic books written on alcoholism exist, like IRON MAN, but nothing has ever intertwined alcoholism so deeply into a character’s life and superhero identity. Despite the success of Buzzkill, Cates’ next mini-series Ghost Fleet met limited success. Sales lagged, and the number of issues was cut from 14 to 8. As Cates sees it, setbacks are a part of the greater plan. The mistakes and obstacles he encounters are part of a learning process, one that will lead him to his overarching goal. Cates is working toward Spiderman. There is a movement within the comic book industry pushing back against the big 2: DC and Marvel. Creators used to work on independent projects at independent labels until they were recognized and hired by DC or Marvel. Recently, artists have been turning away from this trend citing greater creative freedom and autonomy. Cates, not so much. “I want to write Spiderman, a lot. To tell your own story at the expense of not playing in the infinity pool that is DC, that’s dumb. You have the opportunity to put your foot down on something that lives longer than you. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?”
Cates, like the rest of us, faced failure, critique, hardship. He had days where he wanted to quit. There were things he had to learn along the way. “No one is born knowing how to do this. It’s a process. Even now, everyday my characters teach me something new. I grow with them. Sometimes I’ll have an idea of what a character is going to be like, and as I’m writing, the character will go in a completely different direction. And I go with it, because it’s the character telling me who he is actually.” The Donny Cates story isn’t one about his success as a comic writer, but, rather, it is the story about his struggle. Understanding and actualizing what we care about is an experience that connects us. Failure, uncertainty, struggle, are all narratives we share as humans. In the end, that’s the ultimate dream: screwing up, getting tired, quitting, starting over, until you find something worth chasing. Cates’ latest comic, The Paybacks, was released via Dark Horse last Wednesday receiving positive reviews. Cates is currently working on several other projects, including a web-comic. He expects to soon be working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as he has reportedly impressed his superiors with his ceaseless knowledge of her. Residing in Portland, Cates claims to usually be on time and “shave [his] beard and shit,” for interviews. To take him up on the Buffy trivia challenge, he can be reached on Twitter at @Doncates. And finally, be sure to pick up your latest copy of The Paybacks at any of the comic book stores Cates did not run into the ground.
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INDIFFERENCE AND THE TATTERED HEART
The air is stale as we sit down at the creaking table in the corner of the dimly lit bar. It smells like something has been camping out in the cracks of the brick walls for too long, perhaps the manifestation of sweat and anxiety from awkward past dates. Tonight we are on our second date. I tap my toes idly, imaginably second nature at this point, waiting comfortably for the uncomfortable silence I know is coming. I had been doing this for a while now. The past year of my life had been a traumatic shove into adulthood, and instinctively I teetered on the edge of fear. When I got in my car, I wondered if a truck would run a red light making that the last time I drove to school. When I stopped for gas, I had thoughts of guns and mad men. My world had suddenly become a dark place with no room for feelings or quiet moments. Over the course of a year, I had been trying to understand how to live a wholesome life again, knowing how indifferent it could be. For the longest time, everything in my life seemed arbitrary, and I was lost in circular thoughts of death.
Eventually, I found solace connecting with people, even sitting in silence, but it took many cold, empty nights to get to that place. At first, serial dating was an effort to fill the gaping hole that suddenly appeared in my life after Reed left. I met Reed my sophomore year of college; my first real introduction into the labyrinth of the adult dating world. Reed was cool. He was tall, thin, and covered in tattoos. He was a smart, witty, sensitive, perceptive asshole. We got along because we were both a little broken, worn out from everything life had thrust at us. Reed understood things inside of me I had been too scared to name. He pried his way into my life, forcing me to experience the beauty in vulnerability. When it ended, I did a really good job of keeping it together. I don’t know how I did it. My mother had just been diagnosed with stage IV Colon Cancer. Six months later, my dad was diagnosed with Liver Cancer. I kept it quiet for months, not trusting anyone would understand and unwilling to acknowledge my own vulnerability.
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It was as though saying, “My parents, yes both of them, have cancer,” would force me out of the dream I was in only to face the direction my life had suddenly taken. I remember the night my dad called to tell me the doctors had found small masses in his liver. “Don’t worry yet, we’ll deal with it if we have to,” he reassured me. When I set my phone down, I became aware of the sharp cold but my body trembled for reasons other than the wind. The moon was out, reflecting brightly against the glass windows of the art building I was sitting outside of. I ended the call quickly, sensing my voice beginning to quiver, and sat alone in the dark, overwhelmed, laughing, crying, begging God to tell the punch line already and end the tasteless joke. I finally went home to sit purposeless in my room. I wanted only silence, allowing me to flounder awhile in my thoughts. A year later, I am sitting in this bar on a Saturday evening enjoying a dark, hoppy beer with a handsome, fidgeting man. Strangers laugh and chat as I watch silently, enjoying the warm, dull roar around me. When Reed ended things, I didn’t want to think about the pressure in my chest; I didn’t want to process the grief or pain or loneliness; I wanted this part to be over. Occasional memories would bleed into my thoughts only to be forced back to corners I refused to explore. When my parents got sick, I practiced similar ways of dealing with my own vulnerability. “My parents could die” wasn’t a scary thought because I didn’t allow the full weight of the statement to sink in.
Numbing myself was the only way to cope, and I withdrew from my own life. In my story, I was no longer the protagonist. I let life happen around me, and my own narrative faded without a central character. I refused to engage with anything that wasn’t focused on a goal. Take your mother to chemo; I could do that. Make sure to call about dad’s appointment next week; I could handle that. If it weren’t for a chance event, I would have remained living in a bubble for the rest of my life, refusing to deal with anything that was too painful. I loaded the bus to travel back from New Orleans, anticipating a slow, overcast ride. As I zoned out again, avoiding thoughts of the future, of my parents’ lives, the woman sitting across from had a heart attack. An hour beforehand, everyone within earshot was chatting carelessly about their own lives. A man mumbled about his sleepless nights in preparation for a new teaching job. A woman complained about how work was affecting her ability to receive enough food stamps. Everyone chatted, expecting to wake up the next morning facing the same problems. The last thing I remember the woman sitting across from me saying was, “I have work on Monday. I’m just glad to have a job. I just want to work.” She died.
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I watched her body convulse, possessed by the thing that would end her life. Her heart that ticked in her sleep, that she clutched when she heard frightening news, which she gave to a lover, was betraying her. I watched everything gradually unfold from the comfort of my innermonologue. My scattered thoughts floated around my head, and the only thought I felt for certain was “this is bizarre.” ‘Bizarre’ was the word my thoughts kept circling back to. A woman was dying in front of me, and I didn’t feel shock or fear or sadness or much of anything. I just felt out of place. One by one, we slowly realized this moment wouldn’t end like the movies taught us. There would be no ambulances racing her to the hospital, no dramatic cuts to emergency personnel clustering around her still body, no buzzing defibrillator sending waves of electricity through her. Standing outside in the dry summer heat, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, the woman’s sister stood next to me. I took her hand, and she turned and began weeping into my shoulder. I stood, suddenly stricken by this woman’s pain, a stranger who I would never see again, and realized I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about anything besides this moment. “Would you like another beer?” my date asks me. “You know what I am going to say,” I respond. He flashes the same charming smile that had prompted me to ask him about beer a few weeks ago. We had met at a Radio, a local coffee and beer venue. Complete with soft lighting and an assortment of draft beer, I struck up a conversation with him as he cleaned the counters and prepared to close the register. I can’t explain what got into me when I invited him out for a drink. I just didn’t want the moment to end.
I had recently finished reading Daytripper, a graphic novel, by Fabio Moon, about facing death and learning to find joy in quiet moments. “Life is made of these moments. Relationships are based on such moments, such choices, such actions…the moments worth carrying after all others fade. You should look for such moments in life. Moments you’ll never forget. The ones that make all the others worthwhile.” I knew this man was probably not going to be the love of my life, but it didn’t matter. In that moment, I was supposed to strike up conversation with him and indulge in the present. After coming to terms with the possibility of losing both of my parents, life felt different. I found myself unable to pretend caring for things or for people who only cared to talk about things, rather than live them. I wanted to experience joy, sadness, and excitement. I wanted to live, wander, ache, and feel whole inside. I didn’t want to wake up one day to realize I had wasted my entire life scrolling through social media or missing out on opportunities to connect with people. I returned to living as the protagonist of my reality, only this time, I was writing some of my own plot as well. Life is unpredictable. People die on buses. People die of hunger. People die of cancer. I had to come to terms with this reality. I had to learn to be okay with random tragedy, an unknown future, and inescapable grief if I wanted to recognize goodness and spontaneity in life. I never saw my date again, but in that moment, I was there, and on my next date, I’ll be there too.
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FALL 2015
5 NERDS WE KNOW IN REAL LIFE ACCORDING TO TV
We all know the type. Socially inept and perfectly clueless, nerds continue to be timeless archetypes. The nerd has existed on the screen for a while, but has changed significantly over the past decade. Existing mostly in TV shows we desperately deny watching at one point, the one-dimensional nerd who gets picked on by the bullies has evolved to include different characteristics, some of which we might find in ourselves, even though we were never bullied out of our lunch money. This list explores 5 different types of on-screen nerds that actually exist in real life to get to the bottom of what even makes someone a nerd.
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1. The one obsessed with X Rachel Berry, Glee Complete with grand Broadway aspirations, this nerd is on our list for being obsessed with music- and not understanding others who lack her passion. The closest we’ll get to the typical bullied-nerd archetype, Rachel Berry comes to understand herself a driven and ambitious person that didn’t fit into high school. Her relentless passion for music leads her to become captain of the New Directions, the school’s music Glee Club. Her ambition is painful to watch has it manifests itself as awkward, “never quiet know what to say unless it has to do with how awesome music is,” dialogue. Clueless about being teased, she remains optimistic and dedicated to her dreams. Socially inept, Berry never quiet understands how to interact with others but found a group of other socially inept divas also obsessed with music. Together, they win competitions and have feuds with other music nerds. I know what you’re thinking, we all have passions, but her passion becomes “music is life.” This is atypical of high school kids, as most are obsessed with the opposite sex or sports. This is an important characteristic to distinguish about nerds. They come in all forms- comic book nerds, gaming nerds, cosplay nerds, music nerds, tech nerds- but are connected by atypical obsessions that often “become life.”
2. The one who becomes your boss Richard Hendricks, Silicone Valley You know Richard Hendricks grew up reading comic books, coding for fun, and dreading anything that involved interpersonal communication. While working as a programmer at a large Internet company, Hooli, Hendricks is the nerd other nerds pick on. And then, the shy recluse accidentally develops a revolutionary data compressor and suddenly is sitting on a gold mine. He quits his job and recruits people to work on his new tech start-up. Quirky, and uncomfortable with conversation, unless that conversation involves “quantum computing” or “chaos theory,” Hendricks is the nerd who becomes your boss. Probably the kid that got whispered about in the girl’s locker room for accidentally wearing the same Guardians of the Galaxy shirt twice in a row, his limited personal skills have not stopped him from climbing to the top of the Silicone Valley bubble. Hendricks embodies how nerds, although lacking skills seen as essential to being the boss, end up wildly successful; these nerds are not searching to make millions of dollars, but, rather, fall into millionaire status, following a great idea.
3. The one who has no idea what to do about the opposite sex Raj Koothrapali, Big Bang Theory An astrophysicist, Raj loses himself in his work in order to forget how much he does not understand women. Complete with select mutism around women, Raj can only ever speak with them if he is drinking. Unaware of the space he occupies, Raj is unable to understand when and how to speak appropriately. For Raj, his social missteps are part of a greater cycle; he was consumed by his passions, he never learned social cues, he didn’t practice social cues, and as an adult now has no idea what social cues are. Raj tries to be cool, but is often the butt of jokes among his friends, often for misspeaking. Although exaggerated, Raj’s inability to deal with the opposite sex is typical of some nerds who spent a lot of time focused on developing a passion and were uninterested in learning social norms. This is the main difference between your friend who is bad with the opposite sex and Raj; Raj is bad because he was developing other passions- I can’t say the same about your friend. Next time you meet a Raj, ask him about his hobbies, or buy him a drink, as this appears to help Raj forget his anxiety.
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4. The one who capitalized on her awkwardness Liz Lemons, 30 Rock Another awkwardly ambitious character, Liz is a skilled writer with very few social skills and a personality that never got past the middle school traumas. Liz is obsessed with typical nerd things like science fiction and Star Wars, going as far as getting married wearing a Princess Leia dress. A non-conformist at best, nothing about Liz makes sense, and she is completely okay with it. Often times appearing in casual, genderneutral attire causing her coworkers to question her sexuality, Liz only ever responds satirically. Most of her humor manifests in awkward, ironic comments and inside jokes with herself. Liz knows who she is and has turned her nerdy, uncomfortable, peculiar experiences into success. She is sarcastic, ironic, and a bit jaded because she was teased as a child, and sometimes in adulthood, for loving things that were different- but it makes for great writing! Liz Lemons is the secret nerd at work who appears normal, despite a few clumsy comments you dismiss, until you ask her about her hobbies and realize the people who spend their weekends playing Magic The Gathering tournaments at comic book stores walk among you.
5. The one you know is a nerd but have no idea where to even start judging Dwight Shrute, The Office This nerd lands on our list for his love of “beets, bears, Battlestar Galactica.” Hard working and fiercely loyal to his boss and “best friend,” Michael Scott, Shrute climbs to the top of the Dunder Mifflin paper ladder, being named Assistant (to the) Regional Manager after several years of butt kissing. Shrute appears to be a competent salesman and craves authority and respect, but he is actually naïve and gullible, leaving himself susceptible to pranks and socially awkward interactions with his co-workers, mostly women. It’s often made clear Shrute knows nothing about women, going as far as to ask Toby, the HR representative, about basic female anatomy. Shrute nerds out about paintball, weapons,survivalism, and martial arts, and often switches back-and-forth between wanting to fit in and being comfortable in his isolation. There are so many painfully awkward things about Dwight it’s hard to even know where to place him. Is Dwight just a nerd because we have no idea what else to call him? He certainly is obsessive and clueless about women, and he does become the boss by capitalizing on his nerd-ness. Although your instincts about the Dwight at your job are probably right, beware, as you can’t just start categorizing everyone who is weird as nerdy.
weird or nerdy?...
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NETFLIX AND CHILL; THE ENDLESS DEBATE ABOUT MILLENIAL DATING CULTURE Among the latest criticism of millennials is how we have chosen to go about dating. Plastered across the Internet are articles detailing how millennials and their dating apps are bringing about the decline of dating culture. Some even go as far as saying millennials will end the institution of marriage, as one CNN article by Carol Costelo put it. At the center of the millennial dating culture is the proliferation of dating apps such as Tinder, which according to a New York Times article is fast approaching over 50 million users. Although many argue these dating apps are perpetuating a hook-up culture, according to a survey published by Pew Research and Match.com, more than twenty-two percent of 25 to 34-year olds are actively using dating sites or apps to meet people. Jordan Fransciscano, a senior at St. Edward’s University is one of the millennials who used these apps to date. I sat down with Jordan after a round-table discussion with other students on our “ruined culture” to get her thoughts on dating apps. “I met my boyfriend through Tinder. He wasn’t in college so I would have never met him had it not been for Tinder. It didn’t bother me he wasn’t in college. He is a smart guy and not everyone is cut-out for the prescribed path.” They have been dating for a year. Jessica Tamen, another senior at St. Edward’s University, had a similar experience on OkCupid. Her boyfriend is a third year law student at The University of Texas.
“It helps you meet people you would have never talked to in real life,” she said. Jessica and Duncan have been dating for a year. Prior to this, they both had been on the market for two years. “It’s a lot harder to meet people than when our grandparents and parents were dating. The whole thing about meeting someone in the grocery story is dead.” According to a survey published in Aziz Ansari’s book on dating culture, Modern Romance, in the 50s, over 47% of people married someone living in the same building as them. An even greater number married someone who lived on the same block. With the help of American sociologist, Eric Klineberg, Ansari conducted interviews across the United States and found, back then, people were marrying young, for the most part, to get out of a parent’s house. In 2015 women and men are marrying at increasingly older ages. According to the Pew Research Center, the median age for marrying is now 25 for women and 27 for men. People used to meet in college, date for a bit, then marry, but for many people this isn’t happening anymore. “I want it to happen,” says Jordan Miller, a junior at ATM University in College Station. “It would be a dream to have two rings in one day,” she said, referring to an ATM tradition.
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Finding someone in college used to be common enough for ATM to have a tradition for it. As Jordan recounts, the romance begins freshmen or sophomore year of college so the couple has two years to date before tying the knot. On ring ceremony day, the new college graduates get engaged; hence, two rings in one day. “There are no guys who want to be in real relationships. Everyone wants to just be casual, and I’m running out of time.” Dr. Fisher, in a press release following the release of the Match.com survey, said “Despite all we hear about hooking up and divorce, we now have significant data that shows American singles are earnestly seeking respect, trust, transparency and commitment in a relationship.” "If this is what the 'experts' says, why does it feel so hard to date people in college" asked Jordan after I read her the figures. For starters, young people increasingly want their 20s to be about trying new things, making mistakes, growing, and finding themselves. A 2013 New York Times article chronicling dating culture at the University of Pennsylvania captured this trend. In an anonymous interview with a student referred to only as A, the student talks about wanting to settle down only when she meets someone who understands who he is. “I don’t want to go through those changes with you. I want you to have changed and become enough of your own person so that when you meet me, we can have a stable life and be very happy.” The days of the ‘MRS degree’ are distant, as women are increasingly attending college in pursuit of careers, higher knowledge, or a range of other reasons that go beyond “to find a husband.”In fact, the New York Times writes that nationally, women now “outnumber men in college enrollment by 4 to 3 and outperform them in graduation rates and advanced degrees.”
The New York Times again quotes A saying, "I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too.’” Whether a student is studying, learning, experiencing, growing, or even drinking, this constant state of busy birthed and proliferated the dating app as a tool to casually date without getting stuck in something too serious. “I don’t want to find 'the one' anytime soon,” says Christopher, a senior at St. Edward’s. “I’m not ready. I’m just looking for someone to share life with me in this moment. I think we are too focused on the end goal, and casually dating has helped me learn how to experience the present.” Dating apps, exist simply as a way to facilitate relationships. In the words of Aziz Ansari, dating apps are like “having a 24/7 singles bar in your pocket.” Plenty of criticism exists professing the end of dating in America because of the way millennials are going about it. However, this is not a fair assessment of what our dating culture is. There are people who use dating apps for perverse reasons, but that is not new to American dating culture. “Catcalling,” for example, is the equivalent of saying something perverted to a stranger in real life, instead of over the Internet. Studies, like the one Match.com does, show that prophetic statements claiming the end of dating, marriage, and true love in America is near don’t tell the whole story. Dating has evolved. Millennials might choose to watch Netflix and hang out with people they meet on dating apps, instead of drinking shakes at the local diner with their high school sweetheart, but this doesn’t mean the end is in sight. In the end, dating apps only facilitate meeting people. The date itself remains the process of getting to know another person enough to keep seeing them, and this is something that has triumphed throughout the generational shifts.
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BLAME IT ON TWITTER; HOW SOCIAL MEDIA FACILITATES IRRESPONSIBLE NEWS CONSUMPTION On November 9, 2015 the president of Missouri State, the largest public university in Missouri located in Colombia, 30 miles north of Ferguson-a city rocked by protest over the past year- resigned. For the past two months, students at Mizzou had been protesting the lackluster response from university administration to the escalating culture of racism and bigotry. Missouri University student government president Payton Head posted on his Facebook page following an off-campus incident involving unidentified persons directing racial slurs toward him. "For those of you who wonder why I'm always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it's because I've experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here." In protest of the poor response from administration following a swatstika-feces incident, Head went on a hunger strike. On November 7th, the Black Legion, an organization dedicated to tracking issues relating to racism tweeted the photo below.
A photograph of black Mizzou football athletes linked arm-in-arm with protestors, together they issued a blunt statement to the university president, Anthony Wolfe; resign or we won’t play. Shortly after, the head football coach retweeted the photo in support of his athletes. The events went viral, garnering the attention of national news. It culminated in Wolfe’s resignation three days later. What began as on-campus protests over the way Missouri State administration mishandled several racially charged incidents, spun into a nationally covered news story about racial inequality at universities. These protests were quickly added to the growing list of incidents used to talk about racial inequality in America. On Facebook and Twitter students across the nation began to post messages supporting the Missouri protests. “To the students of color at Mizzou, we, students of color at (insert university name), stand with you in full and total solidarity. To those who would threaten your sense of safety, we are watching. "
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The intimate marriage of social media and protest is not a new engagement. Situated Southeast of Colombia, a mere 1 hour 50 minute drive, a city rocked by outrage and protest recovers. Over the course of the past year, Ferguson has been at the center of media attention. In the predominantly white state of Missouri, Ferguson is a city consisting of 29.3% white population and 67.4% black population. What began as protest over the Michael Brown shooting spun into a national conversation about black lives. After the fatal Trayvon Martin shooting- and following the acquittal of his attacker, George Zimmerman, citing selfdefense- three black activists began the Black Lives Matter movement to campaign against violence toward black people. On social media, people debated the relationship between blacks and police. When a new racial incident would surface, you could expect an argument to break out between people who agreed with police and people who thought it was the “black person’s fault.” These simplified conversations about race were facilitated by the easy ‘liking’ and sharing of videos, images, and articles. When we run across posts on Facebook, we usually already have an opinion on the issue, and the story serves either as reinforcement, or we dismiss it citing media bias. “You can’t get on the internet without running across some argument two people are having on race in America,” said Reina Evans, a junior at St. Edward’s, “and it’s usually wrong because it simplifies and limits the entire conversation to anecdotes and personal feelings.”
In May of this year, there was an incident where police officers responded to a disturbance call at a neighborhood pool. The police asked the teenagers, most of them black, to leave the premises as they were trespassing, not to mention truant. One of the girls was not cooperating and the police officer arrested her. A video surfaced and was widely shared showing the girl being tackled to the ground, sparking yet another round of heated debates on race relations in America. Rarely did people who were outraged by the video mention that the girl, who was asked to leave several times, had began taunting the officer right before her arrest. Rarely did people who sided with the police officer question whether tackling a 17-year-old in her bathing suit was an appropriate response. The arguments that proceeded were circular, disputing the facts of the video, but rarely discussing it as a larger social trend or offering solutions. People simply saw the video on social media, liked it, and assumed the arguments about other race related issues applied to this content. Its like standing in the town square ALL THE TIME,” said Beth Eakman, a journalism professor at St. Edward’s University. “The town crier is the person who immediately responds to things without reading.” There is no further investigating done and little conversation that sparks new ideas or progress. “It makes us lazy consumers,” said Eakman. “Social media is all about this instantaneous experience. We want to see a picture. We want to get a quick blurb, 140 characters, and move on because we a ton of stuff to do.”
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This trend is not limited to just protests. On November 13th, a series of coordinated terrorists attacks on Paris left 130 dead and several hundred others wounded. Within hours, Facebook added a profile picture filter so that people could filter their profile with a French flag to show support.
“The campus was completely locked down and students stuck in the library were using their mobile phones to call radio stations and tweet out information and what was happening was information that would have taken forever without social media was being realized instantly to the public.”
“Everyone was just changing their pictures and no one was talking about how this same thing had happened the day before,” said Evans.
Social media has allowed consumers access to information that would have take longer for journalists to report on. In many ways social media is a great tool allowing the free flow of information, but the easy 'liking' and sharing of information makes us less likely to follow up on the story, ensuring what we are consuming is factual. With the tap of a finger, consumers can read information quickly and continue with their lives, not questioning it- especially because it was shared by friends and family. However, this fast consumption forces us to bring preconceived ideas to what we are reading, trapping us in circular argument. As this medium proliferates, we must learn to adapt, exploring how consuming news through social media is affecting our ability to be critical thinkers and ethical consumers.
On November 12th, Beirut was attacked in similar coordinated suicide bombings that left 43 dead and at least 239 wounded. These attacks were the worst Beirut has seen since the end of the 1975 Lebanese Civil War. There were no Facebook flag filters for Lebanon- no viral re-tweets or re-posts on the story. “It’s frustrating. No one seems to care to read about anything that isn’t a sensational blurb or video or doesn’t involve some action so you can say ‘oh yeah I helped because I changed my picture,” said Evans. Never before have we experienced the constant stream of information social media offers. “For me the moment I realized social media was going to become a major force in the news cycle was years ago when there was an active shooter at UT,” said Eakman, referring to the September 2010 incident.
As acclaimed writer Andrew Levkoff once put it, “Why can’t I remember that not once have I ever seen a coin, whether grimy copper or bright gold, that had but one side.” It's because, like news stories, there are always two sides.
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DEAR MODERN LOVE EDITORS Being a millennial is hard. Plastered across the Internet are articles detailing millennial inadequacies; we are responsible for everything wrong in America. The abundance of Snapchat stories documenting moronic choices makes it difficult to counter this argument. However, this narrative has placed me, a Latina millennial, in a difficult position. I am not forgetting how to have “real life” conversations; social media is not “taking over” my life; I am not living in fantasy world mommy and daddy crafted for me. My catholic parents are not stereotypically warning me about hell should I choose to engage in pre-marital sex. I am not faced with pressure to marry, be a “good mother,” and keep a “perfect home.” This past year I started dating seriously and found it difficult to distinguish myself from these labels. Often people would make comments about my ethnicity or assume things about my background that made conversation difficult. This essay explores what it means to be a dating Latina millennial on the fringes of modern dating culture.
As requested via the submission details page, this essay is approximately 1500 words and an honest reflection of my experiences dating over the past year. Beginning with questions of what it means to be a millennial trying to date in the social media age, I work through how being Latina has influenced my understanding of dating culture.
This piece is important because it is a fresh commentary on the intersection of identity and dating via an honest reflection of my culture, both the Latina and millennial one. Although it is specific to these two identities, I suspect it will resonate with readers because of the overarching themes I wrestle with. In the midst of constant critique about millennials, this piece offers readers an alternative to the tired narrative about our mediocrity.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions. I look forward to hearing your comments.
As a first-generation college student at a private university, I have experienced change in ways that allow me to talk about my multiple identities. Having engaged in multiple on-campus activities, I have met people from different backgrounds offering perspective and spurring discussion. Academically, I have presented at St. Edward’s University SOURCE Symposium over a reflective essay on my travels in Bangladesh. I am currently in the process of publishing three different academic papers for the St. Edward’s University Arete Literary Journal.
Thank you, Andrea Ojeda
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ABOUT THE EDITOR Andrea is a third year student at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. She is a political science major with an English minor. For the past few years, she has been working with education related issues in Central Texas, specifically those affecting the Hispanic community. She has interned at the Houston Hispanic Forum writing grant proposals and at the Austin Chamber of Commerce as the Education and Talent Development Intern. When she graduates, she plans to move to D.C. and work on education advocacy and eventually go on to law school. Andrea has presented a paper over her travels in Bangladesh at the annual St. Edward's University SOURCE Symposium. She is currently in the process of publishing three different academic papers in a literary journal, Arete. In her spare time, Andrea enjoys writing about issues affecting her life and community. As a bilingual, multi-cultural person, she is consistently exposed to drastically different perspectives, allowing her to recognize and write about trends and behaviors. When she is not writing or working, Andrea enjoys reading, hiking, and traveling. She spent the last summer working at a school in Peru and the summer before that in Bangladesh working with BRAC, the largest organization dedicated to ending world poverty. She frequently travels to Mexico, often feeling more at home in the quiet city her parents grew up in. Next Fall she will be studying in Spain for a semester to finally have the Europe trip every 20-something-year-old talks about having. Andrea enjoys the usual things people in their 20s do. She likes going for runs around Lady Bird Lake, stopping at her local coffee & beer venue, and watching movies at the Alamo Drafthouse. More than anything, Andrea enjoys spending time with her friends, family, and community whom she is eternally grateful to for their constant love and support.