2024-03-27

About 40 University of Michigan students and Ann Arbor residents gathered at the Diag Wednesday afternoon for a rally kickstarting the Divest! Don’t Arrest People’s Referendum. The referendum is open to current students, faculty and staff on all U-M campuses. It comes in response to the University’s cancellation of two Central Student Government resolutions in the fall 2023 CSG elections and the arrest of more than 40 pro-Palestine student protesters. The rally was held by the Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, TAHRIR Coalition, Jewish Voice For Peace, and the Graduate Employees’ Organization.

The referendum would call on the University to divest from all companies from investing in Israeli companies, call on the Board of Regents to release records of all investments made every fiscal year and to request Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit to drop all charges against pro-Palestine student protestors. The University used parts of its endowment to invest in companies such as Cobham and Ultra Electronics which participated in manufacturing F-35 warplanes that were used in the bombardments of Gaza and Shield AI which produces self-piloting drones used by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Rackham student Ira Anwar said in a speech at the rally that the administration has consistently suppressed student calls for divestment.

“Not only have they told us divestment is impossible, they would rather unleash dozens of police officers on their own students and check us with felony charges rather than have a conversation about divesting from the genocide,” Anwar said.

month ago,” Alameddin said. “Since then, nearly 3,000 people have registered. Every day these numbers grow; there’s an awakening across our campus.”

Anwar said. “Despite whatever the fuck this University’s Regents, Santa Ono and Erik fucking Lundberg will have us believe, we know the Palestinian struggle is our struggle.”

Engineering junior Jenin Alameddin, SAFE political activism co-chair, said, though relatively new, the Divest! Don’t Arrest initiative has garnered widespread support on campus. “The Divest! Don’t Arrest campaign launched only a

Anwar said it is important that the University be held accountable for their investments. “We are here today, just as Palestinians have been (in Palestine) every single day for the past 100 years resisting colonialism, just as you all have been here every day in the past few months despite the felony charges (against protesters),”

The rally ended with the attendees chanting “Divest, don’t arrest” and clapping before attendees split into smaller groups to pass out flyers in University buildings including Mason Hall, the Ross School of Business and the Michigan Union.

Engineering junior Hera Akmal, who attended the rally, spoke to The Michigan Daily in an interview and discussed the importance of student voices being heard.

“I have been really passionate about divestment ever since I became a student here,”

Akmal said. “I think that as students, we have a say in where our tuition money and where the endowment goes. I think if we find it to be morally contradictory with our own values, we have a right to voice that.”

LSA junior Alex Sepulveda, activism chair for Jewish Voice for Peace said in an interview to The Daily after the rally. Sepulveda said he believes the Jewish community on campus should support the divestment referendum.

“As a Jewish student, it is imperative that we mobilize as an anti-Zionist Jewish resistance to American imperialism because the American imperial agenda relies upon the weaponization and anti-simitism and

commodification of the Jewish identity to … fortify and preserve the Israeli apartheid state,” Sepulveda said.

LSA sophomore Levi Pierpont, who attended the rally, said it is important to pay attention.

“We as the students of the University of Michigan get to make our voice heard,” Pierpont said. “(The University is) not just investing in Israeli genocide and Israeli apartheid; they’re also investing in defense mechanisms that the U.S. military uses. So war companies, companies that their whole thing is just creating things that kill people, and many of those people that are killed are completely innocent.”

Pierpont said they believe the Divest! Don’t Arrest campaign has served to increase student

awareness of University investments and endowment.

“I am concerned about the (investments) in Israel. People just don’t know it, but The Divest! Don’t Arrest campaign first uncovered these facts about the endowment and realized how deeply invested (the University) was in all of the awful stuff going on in Israel,” Pierpont said. “They are also now giving us the opportunity to make our voice heard and say this isn’t right.”

When asked about the University’s investment and endowment policies, University spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen wrote in an email to The Daily the University’s financial decisions are apolitical.

AAPD responds to shooting on the 200 Block of North Main Street

One adult male was shot and transported to Michigan Medicine after the incident

100 labor union members and allies gathered on the Diag Saturday afternoon in solidarity against their one common employer: the University of Michigan. U-M students, faculty and community members gathered to hear from union representatives to promote solidarity among unions against the University. The rally, which included the Lecturers’ Employees Organization, United Michigan Medicine Allied Professionals, Graduate Employees’ Organization, Service Employees International Union Healthcare Michigan and the U-M Professional Nurse Council, began on the Diag before marching down State Street.

The event was organized by the U-M chapter of Young Democratic Socialists Association and People’s

Michigan. The rally kicked off with remarks from speakers representing each of the participating labor unions. In her opening speech, LEO president Kirsten Herold, lecturer for the School of

World premiere of ‘Ni Une Más’ highlights UMich survivors’ stories

The performance aimed at spreading awareness about domestic violence and sexual abuse took the stage at Bethlehem United Church of Christ

Content warning: The following article contains mentions of sexual misconduct.

“Ni Une Más,” a performance aimed at spreading awareness about domestic violence and sexual abuse, was performed Friday and Saturday night at Bethlehem United Church of Christ by a group of survivors who came together to share their stories. The show is told in three acts, the first set in Mexico City about the city’s sexism and violence; the second in Puerto Rico, highlighting Hurricane Maria’s impact and domestic violence issues; and the final at the University of Michigan, depicting the survivors of former Michigan Athletics doctor Robert Anderson.

The show was put together when Rackham student Ana Avila met Pamela RuiterFeenstra, lecturer for the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Avila said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that she talked with Ruiter-Feenstra about her own sexual abuse story, and Ruiter-Feenstra then put the experience to music.

Avila said the composing experience contributed to her healing from the sexual abuse she experienced in Mexico City, and she later wanted to extend this opportunity to other survivors who were interested.

“I met (Ruiter-Feenstra) when I was a Knight-Wallace fellow, and she had this idea of composing music with journalists,” Avila said. “I told her my story because I was a survivor but also as a journalist covering stories about gender violence and sexual abuse in Mexico City. We started this project, thinking of how it was healing for me when I came up with my story, and it was healing when I was composing music with her, so we decided to continue this and we invited other survivors, and that’s how we put all of this together.”

The show’s title, “Ni Une

Más,” comes from a movement that started in Mexico City when women at a factory started to go missing and ended up murdered. No federal action was taken to address the disappearances or murders, so women took to the streets to protest against the femicide, shouting “Ni una más,” or “Not one more.”

Ruiter-Feenstra said the show is meant to serve a similar purpose as the protest. In order to help the victims and spread awareness, she said she wanted the show to spread real stories in a way that made their survivors comfortable, but still brought awareness to their experiences.

“So many people want to avoid topics like this, but it’s so important to lean into the discomfort because it doesn’t go away by avoiding it,” RuiterFeenstra said. “It’s like the silence allows the violence to continue. So we feel like we can’t remain silent, and we hope we empower people to join us in standing up to the violence because that’s the only way change can happen and doesn’t keep spreading and spreading.”

The second act focuses on the losses Puerto Rico felt from Hurricane Maria, as well as the story of Alexandra RuizCostas who had lost her sister Andrea to domestic violence. The story was visualized with a dance performed by Isa Huembes, a dancer, teacher and choreographer from Toledo, Ohio. Ruiz-Costas said in an interview with The Daily that the performance was meant to act as an outlet to express her grief but also express the dangers women are facing in Puerto Rico and how they are often ignored.

“We don’t know what the person sitting next to us is going through,” Ruiz-Costas said. “We have to become more vigilant about what is happening around us and to other people. Also, we need to develop more empathy towards victims and survivors because, at least in Puerto Rico, there’s a culture that if it does not happen to me, it will not happen to me … so we kind of claim that it will never touch us, but that’s not the reality of life.”

Visitor to UMich exposes Alice Lloyd, hospital, CVS to measles

This marks the fourth case of measles in the state of Michigan this year

A recent visitor to the University of Michigan may have exposed students and community members to measles, according to the Washtenaw County Health Department’s local alert Thursday. The person was not associated with the University.

The department released a list of dates and times when virus exposures may have occurred, including the Michigan Medicine Adult Emergency Department and its waiting area on March 10-11, the Alice Lloyd Residence Hall’s second floor on March 11, the CVS Pharmacy on Jackson Road on March 11, the NextCare Urgent Care on Washtenaw Avenue on March 12, the CVS Pharmacy on Plymouth Road on March 14 and the Trinity Health IHA Medical Group WestArbor Primary Care and Urgent Care on Jackson Road on March 15.

This marks the fourth case of measles in the state of Michigan and the first person-to-person transfer of the infection this year. The visitor is believed to have contracted measles from the third carrier at the Trinity Health Emergency – Ann Arbor Hospital waiting area on March 1.

The department recommended in the alert that anyone who was at the exposed locations during the specific time frames reported watch for

The final act took place at the University, and told the stories of Jon Vaughn, a survivor of Robert Anderson, and Trinea Gonczar, a survivor of Larry Nassar, the Michigan State University doctor who sexually abused hundreds of young female U.S.A. Gymnastics athletes. The play depicts how both Vaughn and Gonczar have advocated for those impacted by sexual abuse, specifically through their year-long protest on former University President Mark Schlissel’s lawn. The protest aimed to raise awareness about Anderson’s abuse, who sexually assaulted more than 1,000 student athletes for years, but never faced consequences before his death.

Mahi Ruiter-Feenstra, another performer, sang for a younger Vaughn and told The Daily that representing such a story was a difficult experience.

“It’s really different because all the other times I have sung it’s been very upbeat, but with this, I can feel it in my stomach when I’m singing,” RuiterFeenstra said. “I feel the pain that (Vaughn) went through. It’s just very different because it’s not like you’re singing a made-up fairy tale, like all the pain that you can feel and all the words are compressing your heart as you sing it.”

The third act also featured Tad Deluca, one of the first U-M students to speak out against Anderson, which led to him being kicked off the University’s wrestling team and losing his scholarship. Deluca played

himself in the performance and wrote a detailed timeline of Anderson’s actions in the program notes.

In an interview with The Daily, Deluca said he had mixed feelings about participating in the show because he wished the experience had never happened to him or the other members on stage, but he knew he had to make his story heard.

“This show has been everything from wonderful to overwhelming,” Deluca said. “It’s like things I thought were a certain way for 48 years are different. … The last place I want to be is in a play. But here I am. I don’t like this, but it’s something I can do, so I have to do it.”

The show’s program provided a list of resources that people could call if they were experiencing any sort of sexual violence. Avila said the show’s purpose was to show a different side of survivors and share their experiences in a way that seemed natural and could connect with the audience.

“The purpose of this is to express that we’re not only survivors, we are complete human beings,” Avila said. “We all have stories to tell, and everyone can relate to our story. You don’t have to be a survivor to relate to suffering to relate to pain, isolation (or) discrimination, we all have felt these feelings. And I would like people and students to connect with these emotions, but also with the nice part that honestly we are not alone.”

DANA ELOBAID and SAMANTHA RICH Co-Editors in Chief eic@michigandaily.com

ELLA

NEWS

LETTERS TO THE

EDITORIAL PAGE opinion@michigandaily.com

PHOTOGRAPHY SECTION photo@michigandaily.com

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Editorial Staff

symptoms for the next 21 days. If any signs of measles appear, call ahead before visiting urgent care or an emergency room to prevent exposing others. The measles virus remains active in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours and is considered highly infectious. Symptoms appear about 10-to14 days after exposure and can include a sore throat, high fever, dry cough, skin rashes and small white spots on the inner linings of the mouth.

In the local alert, Juan Luis Marquez, medical director of the Washtenaw County Health Department, said the department is working to control the spread of the virus because of its severity.

“This situation illustrates why we work so hard to contain measles,” Marquez said. “People without immunity from vaccination or a prior illness are very likely to become ill if exposed, and about 1 in 5 will require hospitalization.”

Measles cases are on the rise in the United States, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 58 total cases in 17 states as of March 14. The CDC recommends that all children receive the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which is considered 93% effective at preventing measles after the first dose and 97% effective after the second dose.

Adults and college students who have not demonstrated evidence of immunity are also recommended to receive two doses of the MMR vaccine.

UMich struggles to meet students’ rising demand for housing

Amid breaking enrollment numbers, students struggle to find housing on and off campus ADMINISTRATION

11,500.

In an email to The Daily, Director of Housing Rick Gibson said demand for student housing has continued to exceed supply.

At the University of Michigan, students are not guaranteed housing after their freshman year on campus. Amid record-breaking enrollment numbers, many students are left to secure accommodations on their own. As the demand for student housing surpasses availability, the University has taken steps to address housing availability and affordability.

Student interest in the University remains at an all-time high, with undergraduate application volume increasing by nearly 35% from 64,972 in 2019 to 87,632 in 2023. Enrollment in 2023 increased by 8%, from 31,266 undergraduates in 2019 to 33,730.

The University has also invested in a $631 million student housing project on Central Campus, where Elbel Field once was, under their Campus Plan 2050. The project, currently under construction, aims to add 2,300 beds in its initial phase by fall 2026 and additional units in subsequent phases.

In an email to The Michigan Daily, Heather Guenther, director of communications for U-M Student Life provided data that indicated that while enrollment has increased, the total number of rentable beds on campus has remained stable over the past couple of years at

“The level of demand from returning students fluctuates from year to year, as does our number of first-year students,” Gibson said. “For the past several years, demand has consistently outpaced the number of rooms available for our returning students. This year was no exception.”

Furniture, window locations and other architectural components influence the total number of students each space can house. Gibson said bed capacity numbers are dynamic.

“We constantly adjust the numbers of people we can house based on changing conditions,” Gibson said. “For example, spaces are taken offline for renovation, repair, used for isolation housing, or are redesignated at a lower occupancy rate to accommodate specific health needs.”

According to Guenther, all undergraduate, graduate and professional students, as well as residents with families, can apply for on-campus housing. U-M housing does not prioritize assignments based on financial need. Gibson said that after reserving rooms for residential staff and freshmen, students who applied for housing are assigned a bed based on random selection.

Business Staff

Ford School hosts Michael S. Barr, Fed vice chair of supervision

The Federal Reserve Bank vice chair and former dean of Ford School of Public Policy visited UMich for ‘A View from the Fed’ lecture

in a

Hausman.

Michael S. Barr, Federal Reserve Bank vice chair for supervision and former dean of the Ford School of Public Policy, visited the University of Michigan on Thursday afternoon for the Public Policy School’s “A View from

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, dean of the Public Policy School, began the event by welcoming her predecessor back to campus and introducing the audience to his history with the Public Policy School. “He was the Ford School dean for five years and led us through

all the convulsions of adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Watkins-Hayes said. “Initiatives like the Leadership Initiative, the Center for Racial Justice and the Kohn Collaborative for Social Policy all emerged during his time as dean. We are stronger than ever, thanks in large part to his focus on community and continuity.”

UMich implements health and wellness vending machines on all three campuses

The vending machines include emergency contraception, condoms, Naloxone nasal spray, rapid COVID-19 tests and over-the-counter medications

The University of Michigan has installed five health and wellness vending machines across all three campuses in the past two months.

These vending machines include emergency contraception, condoms, Naloxone nasal spray, rapid COVID19 tests and over-the-counter medications.

The idea for these vending machines was inspired by other universities and pushed forward

by a 2022 University task force dedicated to protecting access to reproductive health care on campus after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision struck down federal protections for abortion. The vending machines are sponsored by University Health Services and Wolverine Wellness. The first vending machine was placed on the fourth floor of the Michigan Union in late January. Since then, the vending machines have expanded to the School of Public Health, Taubman Health Sciences Library, Renick University Center at UM-Dearborn and Harding Mott University Center at UM-Flint.

Once the new over-the-counter oral contraceptive pill is available from manufacturers, it will be added to all of these locations.

Student feedback was also central in the planning process. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Mary Jo Desprez, director of Health Promotion and Wolverine Wellness, said the University wanted student needs and ideas to shape this project.

“There was a really intentional effort to get student feedback along the way from the very beginning, including the vending machines,” Desprez said.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Artist Machine Dazzle premieres ‘Ouroboros’ exhibit at UMMA

‘All of these objects have stories, and you start to wonder what these stories are,’

Museum of Art’s Irving Stenn, Jr.

March 14 marked

Platonic love is one of the most beautiful and fulfilling things we can experience. Often, our friends know us better than we know ourselves. They dedicate themselves to navigating the ins and outs of our psyches until they are experts in the topic of who we are — our likes and dislikes, our hates and loves, what makes us tick. When it comes to my friends, I’m like the wife who can predict what her husband will want to eat for dinner: I can sense what they’re feeling from a mile away and care for them more deeply than I could ever express. My friends and I make each other laugh until our stomachs cramp, lean on each other for emotional support and end all of our phone calls with a signed and sealed “I love you.”

Given how deeply rooted our connections with our best friends are, it’s not surprising that they are also abundant in the art we consume. It’s in the movie you watched last week, where the protagonist’s best friend cheered her on through every bad day and flawed decision. It’s in the song you listened to today, with lyrics that made you think of that one car ride with your best friend. It’s in the book you finished the other day that left you wistful and teary-eyed, more thankful than ever for the best friends you have in your life. Friendship in media takes on many different forms, but these relationships — the “best friends” of the media we consume — are essential to the fabric of the art we love. Hence, I introduce to you the Best Friend B-Side. These 15 brave and talented writers took a deep dive into the mechanisms of friendship and art, analyzing platonic love in, outside and because of the media we love. I hope you enjoy their words as much as I do.

The Michigan Daily Crossword

36.

38.

47.

53.

Friendship is found East of Ann Arbor

This B-Side asked us to consider the role art plays in friendship, or, the role friendship plays in art. For us, it is impossible to answer these prompts with anything other than each other.

Our friendship story begins on the first day of our freshman year, walking back from our 9 a.m. firstyear writing requirement course to the South Quad dining hall with a collection of our hallmates. The typical conversation ensued: What did we think of the professor? Are we really going to do all of those readings?

We had been assigned a preliminary writing assignment, a brief description and a reflection on a book we considered to be great. This naturally prompted what, reflectively, would be one of the most important questions either of us has ever been asked in conversation: Well, what is your guy’s favorite book? What are you going to write about?

Our answers came in exciting unison: “East of Eden.” Following an embarrassingly nerdy celebration of shared appreciation, in which we actually clasped hands and danced around under rainbows and sunshine, we began forming the bonds of a true best friendship.

“East of Eden” defines our friendship. The novel, an adaptation of the Bible story of Cain and Abel set in Depression-era California, follows a pair of twins and in our shared love of it, we have perhaps found our own long-lost ones (at least spiritually). The revelation of being neighbors with a fellow Steinbeck stan was, in many ways, earthshattering. It opened up our eager discussion about this shared favorite author, and also one that typifies our occasionally snobby views on literature. This conversation was a building block for the friendship that has grown over the year and a half that has only transpired since.

We share book and movie recommendations, talk about our favorite fashion trends (mini skirts!) and most exciting Depop finds (a vintage Custo Barcelona shirt for $20) and sit next to each other in our three shared classes. We both like to run, enjoy mandatory sweet treats after dinner, gossip, go out to eat and frolic through Nichols Arboretum. We study together, read together, travel together and even write for The Michigan Daily together.

Reminiscing on our relationship, it is clear that art has always been at the center of it. We are built on a foundation of love for art and media. In exploring this love, we have inadvertently learned the values of art, the values of friendship and, perhaps most importantly, how they inform each other. “East of Eden” focuses on acceptance, specifically one of personal power and decision. It defines what it means “to be good,” a message that has transformed our ways of thinking.

In all our nerdiness, hot takes and sometimes delusional aspirations, we have taught each other to embrace our quirks and be confident in our abilities. Without “East of Eden” or “Legally Blonde” or any other art we love so dearly, we would not be able to understand each other’s goals and aspirations to the extent we do. “Barbie” and “The Catcher in the Rye” sparked heated debate between our definitions of quality art and agreement on what counts as an effective piece of media. “As I Lay Dying,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Midsommar,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and countless other books, movies and TV shows have brought us together and defined our friendship. These conversations all stem from our shared love of literature, debate and art — a love we would not have known we shared without “East of Eden.” Whether it be in shared opinions about art or the simple enjoyment of experiencing them together, art is a pivotal part of our friendship, and we cannot thank it enough.

KATHRYN HEMMILA

Design

Arts

I fought with my mom again: But it’s different now

MICHELLE WU Daily Arts Writer

To mom: For building the backbone I never would’ve had.

I’m always full of dread at the onset of another meaningless argument with my mom. Whether it be something insignificant — my choice to wear ripped jeans — or important — like my decision to switch my career trajectory during college — we seemingly have an endless list of things to squabble over anywhere, anytime. We’ve been at odds with each other since I learned to speak. With her traditional values and perspectives as an Asian immigrant parent and my more modern take on things as an American-born teen, it’s no mystery why we disagree on so many things when our personal experiences are so different — also, the fact that I am the older sibling and hence unfairly not the favorite, but I digress.

To me, her views are outdated; to her, mine are foolishly naive.

However long it takes, the torture does eventually come to an end — not in reconciliation, but rather mutual caving into our differences due to emotional exhaustion. Did I mention the freshly peeled, sliced fruit I get as an apology gift? In my household, we don’t give in to the shame of verbally admitting our wrongs.

Our relationship may sound bizarre to those who do not navigate imposing cultural divides with older generations, or familiar to those who face the same infuriating frustrations I do. As a child, I never had the friendships between a loving parent and their little ones I saw on TV or read in books. For the longest time, screens and texts taught me that mothers should be akin to ge-

nies: indulging in my every wish, unconditionally, regardless of what annoying temper tantrums and uncivil acts of disobedience are thrown at them (Caillou and Peppa, looking right at you).

I was treated in no such way. My mom and I had a much different friendship. Instead, my childhood was filled with incessant chastising for not practicing multiplication tables and scoldings for my ungratefulness towards my meager collection of dolls and stuffed toys. Gradually, a feeling of resentment festered within me, and I started to envy those pesky fictional characters and their oh-so-perfect families, that didn’t share the same struggles I had to endure.

It wasn’t until I consumed media made by people of Color that I not only felt less alienated but also realized how I could forge a slightly unconventional, unlikely friendship with my mother. Amy Tan’s poignant tale of four Chinese mothers and their American-born-Chinese daughters in her debut novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” taught me that I’ve only seen one side of my mom’s life, the part after she came to America; “Never Have I Ever’’ and its depiction of Devi’s (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, “Turning Red”) and Nalini’s (Poorna Jagannathan, “The Night Of”) constant bantering allowed me to accept the dissimilarities between quintessential Asian values and American ones; “Turning Red’’ and its depiction of awkwardly entering womanhood made me laugh at the relatability of my own uncomfortable coming-of-age experiences. My preconceived notions of the ideal mom were shattered, soon to be replaced by a more sophisticated and mature understanding of what it means to have an eccentric sort of “best friendship” (or frene-

mies-ship?) with your mother.

“The Joy Luck Club” was incredibly eye-opening in how it portrayed mothers’ experiences as victims, and how this subsequently influenced their parenting habits to prepare shields for their daughters against the cruel outside world. For much of my life, I always believed that my mom was strict because she wasn’t “hip” enough to comprehend the current trends. After all, she spent too much time scrolling on WeChat, where countless videos warned her of the insidious ways kidnappers could abduct small children. To this day, I roll my eyes every time she tells me to watch a clip that could potentially save my life one day. Indeed, this ridiculous level of paranoia annoys me to no avail, and it’s embarrassing that this is the reason I admit to not having gone to a single sleepover until I turned 18. Surprisingly, I feel less bitter about it now, even if I did miss opportunities to create core memories with my friends when I was younger.

What I didn’t know about my mom was that she gave up her management position in Hong Kong to start a family elsewhere. In her job at the time, women were not allowed to be married because it would indicate a falter in power and require unnecessary maternity leave. By risking so much to start a family she might never have, I have a fresh perspective on what it means to have a protective maternal instinct. I truly mean it when I say I don’t blame her for making me seem like a total recluse in elementary school. I don’t know much about her life in China and Hong Kong, but each time she tells me a story from before I was born, I realize how many years of her life I never knew about. It’s

quite humbling to realize her story started long before mine, with many chapters still untold.

In “Never Have I Ever,” Nalini’s panicked reaction towards Devi’s impulsive nose piercing is an all-too-familiar conflict between a first-generation child wanting to explore new ways to express themselves and an immigrant parent’s opposition towards such radical and experimental changes.

My Pinterest account is a time capsule of my interests and inspirations starting from eighth grade (when I discovered the app). One of my fascinations was the concept of peek-a-boo highlights, where only the bottom layer is dyed. It piqued my curiosity because it didn’t look like the balayage highlights every girl my age had at the time. My hairstyle board became increasingly more abundant with pins that had this unique coloring pattern. My mom was strongly

against chemical bleaching and hair dye, which made me even more determined to pick up a job that could cover the hair service and match the beautiful pictures that filled my Pinterest home feed. I finally managed it in the summer before my sophomore year of college, and my hair was a spitting image of the inspiration picture I presented to the stylist. When I got home, I thought the small portion of my head that got bleached would go unnoticed. I couldn’t be more wrong: My mom saw the change immediately and went into a tirade about how frustrated she felt that I was rejecting the beautiful dark locks that she had when she was younger. In her eyes, this was a rebellion against my family’s heritage. In my eyes, I had the freedom to use my money to style myself how I wanted. My mom was so upset she made me sign a contract to never do it again (spoiler, I still got my roots

retouched). Like Devi, I had to break a few rules to earn full rights to dictate my life choices. As time passed, we’ve negotiated our contrasting opinions (who in this generation wears pantyhose under summer dresses in the hweat?), but now we’ve reached an impasse. Unless we’re attending an event where my appearance will impact her reputation, she doesn’t care anymore, acknowledging that I’m responsible for maintaining a good impression of myself. Autonomy is difficult to win when it comes to my mom, but it feels good that she has trust in my decision-making skills, despite making such choices with a different cultural context in mind. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so triumphant about the person I built myself to be had she been more easygoing.

ReadmoreatMichiganDaily.com

Movies are the lifeline between me and my best friend

CORA ROLFES Daily Arts Contributor

I have known my best friend since we were 2 years old. We have managed to convince most people in our lives at some point or another that we are related, either as cousins or sisters. Our time spent together often ends in playful shoving matches. We both bounced around schools so often that by our junior year of high school, we hadn’t shared a class since the first grade. Yet, throughout the 10-year interim, the “best friend” label stuck. When reflecting on how our unshakeable bond has lasted so long while so many other things have changed — boys coming and going, short distances becoming long — I’ve realized how important our love of sitting on a couch and pressing play on a movie is to our bond. Watching made-up characters play out made-up events has been an essential constant throughout our lives and friendship.

As children, we spent hours flipping through her DVD sleeves, arguing over which Barbie movie to finally slide into the player. One night, I was unable to fall asleep and decided I wanted to leave our sleepover. She cried because she didn’t want me to go. Her parents calmed us down by letting us stay up until almost 2 a.m. — an unfathomable and electric time of night for two 8-yearolds — to watch “Mirror, Mirror,” an insane Snow White remake that ends in a Bollywood-inspired dance montage, and from that point on, a staple in our friendship. This habit of ours continued. During the summer of 2020, we watched the Hunger Games series in my backyard, projecting Panem onto my old bedsheets and stacking piles of assorted snacks on top of the plastic laundry baskets we used for tables. We faced the global pandemic and sticky, mosquito-infested summer nights together, remote in hand and eyes glued to the screen. We had nothing to talk about besides the hazy, dimly lit

figures in front of us, and we didn’t want it any other way. At this point, we had been seeing each other only a couple of times a year. We didn’t know much about each other’s friends, school or day-to-day lives. Despite this, we were always able to laugh through a movie together. Whatever we put on, we’d find a way to make fun of it, fawn over its characters and relate to its message.

I will admit that when junior year rolled around and we saw each other daily, the movie-watching kicked into overdrive. Instead of a survival tactic, these movie nights became our lifeblood. They were our currency, an ongoing gift exchange between the two of us. We watched all ten of the Star Wars movies at my insistence (even though she fell asleep during Episode IV three times), and I watched all of “Game of Thrones”

at hers. She got my reaction to the Red Wedding and I witnessed her reaction to the Luke and Leia sibling reveal. She showed me “Pretty Woman” and I introduced her to “When Harry Met Sally…,” as well as many, many more. Through every movie, we laugh. We are the talkative and obnoxious people in the theater. Our combined ability to turn anything and everything into a comedic bit is exhilarating and intoxicating. Maybe this is taboo to write for an Arts piece but … we care nothing for the quality of the movies, the screenwriting or the direction. We have no regard for movies as an art form. Don’t get me wrong; we love movies, but primarily as a vessel for the conversations they spark between us, the countless inside jokes and the sounding board they provide for our relationship. Once again at separate schools, movies are more important to us now than ever. When I see a TikTok about something from our shared catalog of favorites, I send it to her and she does the same

for me. We’ve branched out to TV shows, and she’s started watching “Succession,” of which I love hearing her opinions. We are both eagerly awaiting season two of “The House of the Dragon.” We’re also currently brainstorming characters we can dress up as for our Halloween costumes next year. And when I visited her at college last semester, sure, we hugged and caught up, but we also put on a movie. Movies have kept me and my best friend close. When there was nothing to say, no window into each other’s lives; the stories we shared made a door that we could run through, no pleasantry or small talk necessary. The ability we have to joke about absolutely anything as long as there are characters and a plot is part of why I love her so much. Beyond our undeniable comedic chemistry, movies are a large part of why we have been able to stay close for so many years. I owe my love of movies to her, and to movies, I owe my love of her.

For as long as I can remember, my sister has been my favorite person in the world. I had to be just like her in every single way. She was, and still is, the coolest person I know. She is kind, thoughtful and extremely patient. She never holds grudges and always tries to be understanding rather than angry. Madison Nicole Travis Knighten — or as I know her, my sister — is what everyone should aspire to be. If you’re searching for someone who will inspire you to be the greatest version of yourself, look no further. My sister and I have a four-year age difference, so naturally, she was my walking Pinterest board. I was a copycat of everything she did. She painted her nails neon pink, so I forced her to paint my nails neon pink, too. She wore a polka-dot ribbon in her hair, so I stole that ribbon and wore it to school the next day. She had a pair of black combat boots, so I asked for them for Christmas. I thought that emulating her was the highest compliment. Unfortunately, my sister did not see it that way. My unwavering admiration for her started to cause a wedge between us. I wanted to hang out with her and do everything she did. She wanted to be with her friends and wanted nothing to do with me, seeing me as nothing more than her tag-along sidekick. Unfortunately for her, her wish would never come true. We shared a room until I was 11. You can imagine how that went. It forced us to love each other, and I accredit our relationship to that time of our lives, but if my sister were ever going to commit murder, it would be within those ugly yellow walls. Our maturity levels differed far too much for us to relate to each other in those years. She was my very best friend and I was hers, but it was difficult to get along when my biggest worry was Zayn leaving One Direction and hers was whether or not the boy she liked was writing songs for other girls. While all of this is true, my sister was still the one person I could always count on. When I was younger, I had a debilitating fear of thunder. I would cry during thunderstorms and start shaking. Tornadoes and thunderstorms are extremely common in Alabama, so I would have these mini panic attacks fairly often. I would stare at the ceiling watching the lightning light up my room and dramati-

cally ponder whether or not this would be my last night on Earth. My sister and I could have gotten into the most intense fight of our lives hours before the storms began, but she would always let me sleep at the end of her twin bed during them. My sister took on the role of my mom in more ways than one. We were there for each other because we had to be. Our life has never been easy, and we were the only ones who knew how it felt to

go through what we did. In a sort of trauma bond for survival, we lost the innocent friendship sisters are supposed to have, replacing it with a more necessary parent-child bond that the unfortunate events of our home life demanded. Things began to change when she moved out. Both of us realized just how much we needed each other. We needed our Sonic parking lot conversations accompanied by the greasiest mozzarella sticks

below the Mason-Dixon like we needed water. We had taken each other for granted all these years and, now that we were not together every day, we began to realize just how much we relied on our small moments together to keep ourselves sane. We started texting each other about everything — whether or not the blonde boy liked me back or what pasta she should get at her favorite drive-thru Italian restaurant. The both of us had

to make an effort, and sometimes the calls were half-hearted, but we knew that we were trying our best. Our friendship began to flourish because we knew how much we needed each other to simply exist. Even though we live 10 hours away from each other, I can confidently say that she is the greatest person I have ever known and will ever know. My sister anticipates every emotion I have before I can even feel it. She sees everything from a bird’s eye view and considers how she could affect someone else in every decision she makes. She is unselfish to the point that it’s ridiculous, so much so that she once gave a homeless man her entire lunch box rather than simply the food in it. She finds out what the one thing I want most for Christmas is and ensures I get it every year. She loves New York and hotel bars. She buys overpriced birthday cakes and makes every single person she comes into contact with feel special. In the times when we had nothing but empty cereal boxes and packs of Kraft cheese, we had each other — and we needed nothing more. I have more pride in being her sister than in anything else I have ever done. She has loved every insufferable version of me, and I will owe her for the rest of my life.

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I haven’t fallen in love in a while. Although infatuation rests its head on my shoulder, its hair tickling my cheek, like your curls — that you insisted were not blonde — once did. I’ve befriended infatuation in your absence actually. I’d like to think we’re good acquaintances. It gifts me the funniest stories; I’m laughing evening to dawn. Curled up in its embrace, but the sheets aren’t warm. Not like when I was in your arms. But nonetheless, infatuation keeps me company. It’s sweet and fills my head with fantasies. As its face changes from each week, sometimes each day, it devises a hero’s journey with knights, castles and occasional monsters. What a performer it is. I’ve always admired those who can change their form so easily although it makes them harder to hold on to. Shapeshifters have a habit of slipping right out of your hands, even if moments ago they said they would never let you go.

When I was little, my favorite part of the day was when I nestled into my sheets, waiting to greet my first best friend: the Sandman. He understood me. He knew my dreams, my desires; after all, he did build them with me. Together we escaped the mundane realm and nursed the growing pains. At sunrise we would part ways, tethered by our trust in reuniting at dusk. Since entering college I haven’t felt the need to call upon him as my dreams have finally manifested into a tangible form beyond sand and wind. Although, in your absence, infatuation has started to resemble him. In daylight, the fantastical romance is projected to fill the void.

The hourglass flips. Infatuation comforts me nowadays, although differently than you had. It can’t scratch my arms until it goes numb.

The Sandman’s daughter

Tracing circles and spirals as though fairies danced upon them, your laugh, their jingle or song. Infatuation doesn’t dance at all for that matter. It doesn’t topple over my feet or its own, our giggles harmonizing with Romeo Santos. It doesn’t get too excited and start bouncing with the bongos when the clave hits four. 1-2-3-tap. Stay grounded. 1-2-3-tap. Is it salsa or bachata? 1-2-3-tap. Come on, I know you know. 1-2-3-tap. Two no sabo kids. 1-2-3 tap. The claves roll one more time. 1-2-3-tap in broken Spanish. We’re both in the dark. 1-2-3-tap. Before the song ends and before I know it, 1-2-3-tap, I’m moving out alone and you’re already on your flight home. 1-2-3-tap no es amor lo que tu sientes, 1-23-tap se llama obsesión. 1-2-3 tap. Did you miss my call? 1-2-3 tap, or did I not call at all? 1-23- tap. I don’t have it in me to check my phone. 1-2-3-tap, una ilusión en tu pensamiento, 1-2-

3-tap, how could you let me go? 1-2-3-tap, how could I let you think I wouldn’t give you the world. 1-2-3 tap, así funciona el corazón, 1-2-3 tap. I asked about you the other day, to someone in your program. I said your name properly, the g aspirated instead of with a glottal stop. I smiled when they didn’t recognize the name, not out of spite or because your dad changed it when he left the PR, but because I remembered I’m the only one who says it like that at all. But the name that I called you after that made the rest of my breath chase after the Spanish alphabet, so when I said “my best friend” it was practically a whisper. I wonder if you still say my full name, with the Spanish “i” when people ask you who is yours. I pray so. I pray. And I don’t pray anymore. But I pray that I’ll make it back home. To you, one day. Once I set my pride down

and pick up my phone. Out of sight out of mind, right? Both of us are too used to being alone. Or at least I am. And you’re OK as long as he’s around. Yin and yang — forever in contrast but still one.

I am a little spiteful to be honest. When I see him around, the side eye I wish I could give him is atrocious. But I know how much he means to you, and how much it means for me and him to get along. Despite this, I’m starting to think he’s the reason that you’re gone. We teased that we were fighting for your love, he got you flowers but I got you mango tea after your show. He met us in Miami but I’m the one that you took home. You met his parents, but my sister said there’s no one she’s more excited to see when she comes into town. You borrowed his car and took us to Joe’s, but to Carmen you barely spoke a fucking word. You couldn’t stand to stay around. You

couldn’t stand to face yourself. You left before the food turned cold. You left but I let you go. For that, I’m sorry. Yes, for that I’m in the wrong. I fell in love with the Sandman’s daughter sometime in September. It was the result of my new heart, rebuilt and ready to ring passionately into my next life, that I surrendered to the divine power of luck. I met her serendipitously right at the start. We share music, we share fire, we share the burden of light on our sunkissed faces that many wish would burn us instead, but we reflect and illuminate nonetheless. I speak in words I don’t understand, and feelings I wish I hadn’t taken for granted. How we fell in love I truly can’t track alone. Like when you wake from a dream you can’t quite remember, you just know it was profound. I would need her assistance or at least the entries in my journal, that I wish I had committed to

The ever-changing curl

At 7 p.m. in 2008, I was sitting in the house I’ve always known. My mother’s dinner still filled the air as she finished cleaning. Telemundo was playing on low volume, highlighting the most recent celebrity gossip. The couch, donated by my grandmother, was as scratchy and warm as it’s always been. The sun had finally set and my mom reminded me to get ready for bed. I ran to my sister, the only person I knew who protected her long waves. She attempted to dry brush my knotted curls and spoke softly, “Why does your head look so different from mine?” I was holding back tears from the amount of yanking. I felt each follicle burn and plucked with every brush stroke. “I don’t know.” My sister put the brush down and wrapped my hair into a ponytail. And she hugged me. She didn’t understand, but she tried to.

At 11 a.m. in 2021, I needed a change. My mom drove me to the salon to get highlights. I had no clue what I even wanted. “Can I take pictures of your hair? I’ve never had a client with diferente rizos.” I agreed, but a part of me felt anger. I didn’t want to be complimented on something I couldn’t bring myself to appreciate. I believed a pricey color and cut would solve any disdain I held.

I never wanted to beg for my curls to sit the same way across my head.

A head with multiple curls patterns was annoying. I never felt the typical joys of sitting in front of the mirror. Every day, my reflection was a reminder of those diferente rizos. The routine of taking care of my hair felt like a chore rather than a choice.

I began to understand the undertones of “Don’t you want me to straighten your hair?”

“You should straighten your hair for the science fair.”

“I just want you to feel and look good.” I could never control these comments, but what I could control was how I internalized them.

How could they make a little girl loathe her own existence?

I questioned where this hatred came from.

filling properly. But I remember my first expansion of soul with her hand in my hair and my eyes softly closed. Or turning over and seeing her golden curls sprawled on the pillow case. I settled the crown of my head into her wings and allowed my breath to become hers. I remember the exhilaration of speeding across the blazing waves, the jet ski leaning however she told, my arms tightly around her padded body and my cheek resting on her shoulder. We screamed and shouted, proclaiming our love for each other into the sun, as it dipped into the ink of night so it could gather the colors needed to create tomorrow. I wish I had held on harder. I didn’t realize the sun was not meeting us, to take us to the next day, but rather it was slowly falling, drawing the end over our head as the story came to the perfect close.

Dotting the i’s and crossing its t’s. If only I knew that was the end. The acknowledgement pages were the cushions that comfort us so we are not thrown abruptly into the blank unyielding inside cover. I flip the book over hoping the back would allow the story to live just a few moments longer. Unfortunately it’s in vain. This whole time I thought I was the author but instead it was her. Her big eyes speckled with gold that smiled slightly at me, as though she knew a secret that we never could. Or that she is on the brink of pain so deep she has learned to change her form and morph. So one can only assume they know what she knows. I can only assume. I can only propose.

And so I wake. I made peace with the Sandman’s conditions when I was a child, and I will do so again. When the hourglass is empty I must return to the world without them. Now infatuation studies your mold. That’s the deal. I understand. Thank you for the time.

Te quiero mucho, Your best friend.

Black ancestry that can never be wiped out. This doesn’t only stop at ‘the perfect coil.’

We should be able to embrace all and any form our hair can take.

Self-love gave me autonomy.

The choice to bleach, cut, dye, braid in any form I wanted.

Over the years, I came to cut my own hair as I pleased. Learning the methods of blending and what the difference of a wet and dry cut can do. I took the risk of bleaching my hair and dyeing it traffic-cone orange. I found the ingredients that protected my hair from such a change and highlighted my curls in the ways they should have always been. I began getting to know myself better. With every change came a compliment, and through reminding others, I reminded myself that the only way we can escape these oppressive expressions of curly hair is to simply do what makes us feel good. Routines are meant to evolve; humans are meant to adapt.

Self-love is a process.

Self-love developed in spite of these comments.

Any self-hatred I held came from years of reciprocal ignorance of the perceived Blackness in my family. I owed self-love to the generations who struggled alongside and before me.

To all the Black women I came from, I could’ve never imagined myself showing my mom what a bonnet does to your hair. What co-washing means. What a curl routine can and should have. This sharing of tradition taught me that our curls are generations of

My mother taught me the ways of connecting to music through the body. In return, I taught my mother the ways of taking care of our distinctive curls.

I no longer feared the everchanging coil. Fear had only allowed hate to grow stronger. 8 p.m. in 2024, I sat at my kitchen table undoing my braids one by one. My mother wanted to help; she’d never done it before. So I began to teach her the process: cutting a braid, unfolding it little by little and seeing each fiber unwind into loose strands. Selflove is dialogue that is meant to be shared.

I’m borrowing grief from the best of me. From the best of my years, my late 20s, when so many things in my life will have ended, forgotten in lieu of the equally many beautiful beginnings laid out before me. When I pop the champagne, raise the glass, confetti falling in waves of shimmering gold, I won’t be remembering the loves I left behind. The friends I’ll have lost by then, the beaded bracelets and love letters from stories long gone in a dusty box, abandoned by promises left to ashes. Where did our forevers go?

Forever is an odd, slippery thing. I sometimes think I have a grasp on it, that I’m able to comprehend its implications, but then it falls away as if it were never there. Maybe because it wasn’t.

It’s funny, in a dark way, a sad way, looking back at old pains that can’t touch us, old forevers that I once cradled in the palm of my hand, left to collect dust in the back of my mind. The ones that meant the most to us, gone in moments that are nearforgotten today. It doesn’t even always need to end badly for the feelings afterward to be numb. I think of friends from high school, I think of the girls I met at a summer biology camp after sophomore year. We’d longed to have forever together, but then distance intervened, reality set in and our friendships came to a quiet, empty close. It wasn’t painful, somehow. We’d spent nights staying up together, rooms falling from sounds of our dramatic teen TV shows to soft snores in the darkness

past 1 a.m.. We’d lived together, loved together, grown together, and on paper it sounded like the makings of an everlasting friendship. But some part of me knew that it was going to fall apart.

Love and loss on repeat. I’ll make friends and lose them, pick up love off the ground and then leave it behind. A cycle as consistent as the seasons. Sometimes it’ll hurt, and sometimes it won’t feel

like anything at all. Looking at it, the numbness somehow seems worse — how can I feel so little about the things I’ve left behind? When I think of the version of me from those beginnings, from the early, good times, I know she’d be devastated. But the version of me now, with different thoughts and words, the version of me who’s just a little wiser, isn’t that same girl. And so I don’t feel that same sorrow — I can’t.

I watched a movie recently about love and loss, a French film directed by Agnès Varda called “Le bonheur“, or “Happiness.” The story follows a man who falls in love perhaps too easily, and rather disastrously. As a year goes by and the seasons change from early summer to late autumn, he tumbles from one lover into another, leaving destruction in his path. It’s painful, and a little monstrous, when I watch how

he moves from one to the next. And yet, I recognize that I’m capable of the same.

A year from now, I wonder where my love will fall. In these three years of college, the dynamics of my connections have already changed dramatically. The people I had late-night talks with, laughing and crying into the early mornings, are some of the same ones who I don’t call, who I don’t wish happy birthday to,

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and who don’t wish the same to me. I think of the people I awkwardly wave to on the sidewalk, the people I avoid, the people I cried over and the ones that I can’t even remember as I’m writing this. It’s terrifying how quickly things change, how quickly some forms of love and affection and camaraderie can fray and snap. But it’s not even snapping, really — it’s a slow dissolve, a love letter soaked in water, coming apart even as you try to pick it back up. I hold onto the ones I love now like a bouquet of flowers. I look at the beauty, admiring, loving and fearing the day they’ll shrivel up, dry petals falling to the table. There is no certainty with humans, not like with already-cut flowers, but the fear can take over regardless. I look at my friends and wonder if I’m staring at a future stranger. I hug my boyfriend, wish I could tie myself to him, pray that our intertwined fingers will always be able to find each other. Because I’ve loved and lost before, I’ve numbed myself to others, but not him. I pray, not ever him. Spring is returning, as it always does, after the cold death of winter. So this spring, as the cycle continues, I’m raising a glass: Here’s to the ones I’ll lose, the loves that life will tear from me and the ones I’ll choose to let go. Here’s to the moments that won’t last, memories I’ll abandon. I won’t cry then, so I’ll steal the grief and feel it now. As I look to the future, standing on the memories of the past, I sometimes wonder where all of my forevers have gone. Promises, broken and scattered. But forever exists in the fact that the world will keep on turning, and there is always more love to find.

A reluctant Arab endeavors to read Tolstoy

“I may,” I scribbled into my journal, “have bitten off a little more than I can chew.” Two weeks earlier, I had checked out “War and Peace” from the library because I loved to read, and readers must love long books, and what book is longer than “War and Peace?”

I took it with me across the world and held it until my arms shook beneath its weight. The last place I wanted to spend my 14th summer was the Middle East, with its smoky air and unbearable heat. My vague memories of my previous visits to Lebanon consisted mostly of painful mosquito bites, unfamiliar cousins, and

unintelligible conversations. Despite growing up in a largely Muslim-American community, I had slowly absorbed a subconscious aversion towards my heritage and home country one vitriolic internet post or odd look at a time, and had retreated into other cultures instead, teaching myself French and immersing myself in European literature. Returning to the Middle East, that world I felt I had nearly extracted myself from, was unthinkable. I decided to carry what I saw as the entirety of Russia with me if I had to go. My family and I made our first stop in Lebanon, whisked my grandfather away from his little village, and caught a flight to Iraq to begin visiting various mosques and shrines. I had been expressing my

doubts in my journal when my grandfather, from his seat beside me on the airplane, peered at the book in my lap and sounded out, “War … and … Peace?” I blinked at him in surprise. Those were the first words he’d uttered to me in over an hour – we had come to the silent agreement that, between my broken Arabic and his shaky English, communication would be futile. Years of attending weekly Arabic classes against my will had yielded me a distaste for the language and its labyrinthine grammatical rules but not much else. Then he asked me what the story was about. I extracted the Arabic words from the recesses of my memory to tell him the story involved Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, romance, cults, duels and just about anything else

you could think of. He looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Speaking of Napoleon, I know French,” and counted to 10 to prove it. I counted the rest of the way to 20 to show him the French I had picked up, too. My first real conversation with my grandfather was thus shaped by Napoleon, Tolstoy, and our spare knowledge of French. I glanced at my journal, reread what I had written in my hesitation, and decided that, though my bite was admittedly too big, I would nonetheless chew with determination and a more open mind.

When we arrived in Iraq, I stubbornly took “War and Peace” with me everywhere and read it in every spare moment. I wasn’t old enough or wise enough to understand what Tolstoy meant when he argued

kings are the slaves of history, or to recognize the innuendos strewn across the story. But I was young and naïve enough to feel Natasha’s despair when her beloved Andrei left her for an ineffably long span of one year. I was conflicted enough to sit inside one of the holiest sites of my religion and join Pierre’s tortuous search for God in a godless world. And when Andrei fixed his gaze on the sky amid a meaningless battle, I couldn’t help but tilt my head and follow the elaborate minarets of the mosque with my eyes before settling contentedly on the cloudless Iraq sky. I had not realized that the doubt and shame buried deep within me were shared with other people across immeasurable time and space, and could be faced with tenderness and honesty. For

the first time, I saw harmony between the heritage I had eschewed and the world I had chosen for myself.

To live is to confidently throw myself into a task I know I’m not cut out for, to grasp at any bits of truth I can find and fill in the gaps with my enduring hope and inexperience. I found that the heat of my homeland blends nicely with the frosty, war-torn world of my literary dreams. My desperate urge to tear myself away gave way to the understanding that I can embrace my religious and ancestral roots and grow alongside them. Not a day goes by where I do not grapple with God, Arabic grammar and myself, and perhaps I’ll never reach all the answers, but I know I get closer with every step and every turn of a page.

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The Summer Bridge Scholars Program needs to change

JOVANNA

GALLEGOS Opinion Columnist

Jan. 28, 2022, should have been one of the happiest days of my life. The day had been filled with anxiety as my friends and I awaited our admission decisions from the University of Michigan. When I got in, I was ecstatic — until I noticed a detail on my admission letter. Even though I had applied to the fall 2022 term, and only the fall 2022 term, I had been accepted into the summer 2022 term. I was still proud — I had been accepted to my dream school, one of only four people in my class. But as I shared my acceptance letter with my three class peers, we noticed that two of our acceptances were conditional upon participation in the “Summer Bridge Scholars Program,” while the other two were not.

SBSP is run by the University’s Comprehensive Studies Program. Established in 1983, CSP was developed out of the Black Action Movement’s three decades of coordinated, direct civic action, meant to be the University’s attempt to reduce divides in educational opportunities and aid historically underrepresented populations in higher education. SBSP’s specific goal is to bridge the gap “in opportunity created by inequitable systems in education.” It offers incoming students from these backgrounds the opportunity to build a sense of belonging and complete six academic credits during a summer in Ann Arbor. CSP and SBSP mean well; trying to make educational opportunities more equitable for every U-M undergraduate is a noble goal. The way SBSP is executed, however, perpetuates the inequity it seeks to eliminate.

The existence of SBSP is not advertised on the University’s Undergraduate Admissions website. After interviewing some SBSP admits, I learned al-

most all were not aware of the program’s existence prior to applying to the University, including me. For students admitted to SBSP, going to the University — a dream school for many — is contingent on starting in the summer term instead of the fall term they originally applied for. SBSP is branded as an “opportunity” for incoming students, but it’s also a requirement. Program admits cannot opt out of if they would like to attend the University as a freshman. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA freshman Tasnova Adrita, a member of the SBSP class of 2023, said that she was confused when she received her U-M acceptance letter, because it was unclear what SBSP actually was.

“My initial reaction, when I came, was that everyone (in SBSP) was first-generation,” Adrita said. “Some people were from low incomes. Did they just lump low-income people all together in Summer Bridge?”

Students are not given the reasoning as to why they were chosen for SBSP. After speaking with my SBSP class of 2022 peers, I learned that many of the admits did not have access to many Advanced Placement courses, if any, during high school. Some were the first generation in their family to go to college or came from a high school where few students attend the University. Students who are curious about how they were selected are given a general statement: “Staff from the University of Michigan Office of Undergraduate Admissions make determinations for SBSP based on a holistic review of your application, background, and interests.”

When committing to the University, SBSP admits must submit two FAFSA forms — one only for the summer semester and the other for the fall/winter term. Being required to pay for an extra semester that students never planned to take in the first place places a financial burden on

low-income students like myself. Despite available scholarships, I still had to pay 60% of the summer costs, disrupting my plans to work and save for fall tuition. Furthermore, SBSP prohibits students from working part-time or engaging in work-study during enrollment, increasing the financial burden for those who had intended to earn money before starting college in the fall.

LSA sophomore Jacqueline Rodriguez, who was part of the SBSP class of 2022, said that she didn’t understand their policy on part-time jobs.

“I didn’t understand that. We had a lot of time on our hands, just having two classes. I was in my room for most of the day; it was horrible. And I was so bored because of that.” Rodriguez said.

SBSP students have the options of two classes: CSP 100 (Seminar in Academic Engagement) and their choice of CSP 103 (Foundations in Quantitative Reasoning and Literacy) or CSP 105 (Writing and Culture Seminar). CSP 103 is a precursor to MATH 105 (Data, Functions, and Graphs), the University’s pre-calculus course, which in and of itself is a lead-in to MATH 115 (Calculus I), the University’s introductory calculus course. MATH 115 is required for many U-M majors and minors. However, this places SBSP students two semesters behind their peers in math, contradicting claims on the program’s website that it provides a competitive edge for the fall term.

If the program were to deliver on this promise, it would need to advance students’ math skills to at least the level of standard math sequences rather than leaving them to catch up starting with pre-calculus. The SBSP Program, though not without its drawbacks, does provide students with the chance to live on campus for seven weeks and familiarize themselves with Ann Arbor before the fall semester. SBSP students are also automatically

The cognitive gap in CPR training is costing lives

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is the most crucial thing a person can do on someone who is pulseless. It is distinguished by two unique moves: chest compressions and rescue breaths. When combined in a specific pattern over the course of fixed time intervals, CPR perfuses oxygenated blood throughout the body. Thirty-day survival rates are 2.6 times higher for patients who were given bystander CPR. Proper CPR training is, consequently, paramount in a community where finding others unresponsive is eerily commonplace. Helping others arises from a cognitive seed that translates to action — the cumulative effect of conviction, motivation and empathy brewing in the decision-making centers of our brain. It is therefore appalling that both the American Heart Association’s and American Red Cross’ CPR training — two of the most popular and acclaimed curricula — provide no real lessons on how to develop the initiative needed to resuscitate someone.

As it stands, traditional CPR training focuses on imparting to trainees the mechanics of chest compressions, defibrillator use and basic airway management. While these skills are undoubtedly essential, they are useless if a potential rescuer does not have the mental toolkit to act on their CPR expertise. A number of psychological phenomena, including some especially persistent in young adults, malign a provider’s ability to conduct CPR. For that reason, certification training must include behavioral coaching.

One such phenomenon is the bystander effect, where individuals are less likely to offer assistance in an emergency situation when others are present. People often assume that someone else will take charge, leading to critical delays in initiating life-saving measures. Moreover, the propensity of college students who would’ve otherwise initiated CPR decreases in the setting of watchful and judgmental peers. It is the nature of many young people on college campuses to observe and

criticize each other’s seemingly insignificant behavior, ranging from how someone lifts weights at the gym, eats at the dining hall or types on their computer during class. Sadly, there is tremendous potential for this effect to take precedence at a party, where the possibility of finding a peer in need of help is more likely.

But, in regard to the bystander effect, most people are at least somewhat aware that that action should be taken when an emergency takes place. A more concerning phenomenon is implicit bias, or unconscious prejudice against a group of people that results in differential treatment. Factors such as age, race, gender or socioeconomic status do play a role in how we interact with others. The failure to interact with someone in need of CPR burgeons from our own implicit bias about them.

Current CPR certification programs may argue that the teaching of cognitive deficits is too ancillary for the core purpose of resuscitation training. They might believe cognitive training embedded into an hourlong CPR training session wouldn’t procure a permanent change in people’s willingness to do CPR or arm them with initiative they didn’t previously have. However, research shows this is not the case.

In a study conducted on 1128 university students’ willingness to conduct CPR, researchers found that 66.6% reported a lack of confidence, 56.4% reported fear of causing further damage to the patient and 37.4% reported fear of litigation as the main obstacles to them performing bystander CPR. Barbara Farquharson, associate professor at the University of Stirling, sought to explain these discrepancies by reviewing the psychological and behavioral factors associated with CPR performance. After investigating 105 different studies, Farquharson and her team found that preparing people to manage strong emotions and increasing perceptions of capability are important foci for interventions aiming to increase CPR initiation.

I myself have failed to contribute to CPR during a code alert during my experience as both an emergency medical technician and a nursing assistant at Michigan Medicine’s Pediatric Cardiothoracic

ICU. Surrounded by doctors, nurses and ancillary staff undertaking tremendous feats to revive a baby, I stepped out of the line of people volunteering to rotate chest compressions and chickened out rather than jumping back in. My passion and conviction to help was there, but I had never been trained to overcome the mental blocks of fear, diffusion of responsibility and selfdoubt of my own medical skills. Had I received more training in my CPR classes to address — or at least bury — cognitive dissonance during emergencies, I would have been more apt to help those around me. There is no good reason that, at the University of Michigan, there exists significant lapses in basic medical intervention from peers. Given the aforementioned psychological phenomena and their persistence among younger people, CPR training that includes behavioral coaching would save more lives. College campuses would be an ideal catalyst for proliferating psychology-inclusive CPR or naloxone training because the benefits would be immediately observed. Fewer students would bear the ramifications of prolonged overdose or cerebral hypoxia, and countless people would have one less loss to experience. It’s a winwin situation. Despite the current deficit in CPR training being large and glaring, it is straightforward to rectify. Both the AHA and Red Cross need to collaborate with leaders in the field of psychology and emergency medicine to roll out a new curriculum that includes cognitive training for those in need of CPR certification or recertification. In the final assessment to evaluate CPR abilities and knowledge of protocol, it is essential that trainees are also required to verbalize strategies and skills to bring themselves to take action. In addition to checking for scene safety and responsiveness upon arriving at the site of a heart attack, for example, trainees should also be taught how to deescalate their apprehensions, recognize bias in CPR conduct and mitigate the time it takes to decide to help. These skills foster a culture of proactive assistance in diverse emergency situations, ensuring no one is left behind in times of basic medical need.

Editor’s Note: The Michigan Daily Editorial Board interviewed five of seven Central Student Government executive tickets. Alifa Chowdhury, Shut It Down presidential candidate, is a former Daily staffer. The Editorial Board was made aware of this prior to the interviews. Chowdhury did not influence the Board’s final decision or contribute to this article.

On March 27 and 28, University of Michigan students across all 19 colleges and schools will be eligible to vote in the Central Student Government’s presidential election. Created during the Vietnam War, CSG has served a changing role on campus over the years. CSG is now responsible for funding student organizations with an almost-six-figure budget, engaging with U-M administration on behalf of the student body and passing both policy and advocacy initiatives to improve student life. The CSG Executive Branch serves as an important arbitrator between student interests and the administration. Given the importance of the job, The Daily Editorial Board interviewed five presidential tickets to make an informed endorsement. After careful consideration, this Editorial Board has decided to endorse LSA juniors Terra Lafreniere and Jules Quenioux under the MomentUM ticket for the CSG presidential election. Operating CSG is a difficult task. With its bloated size and often-grueling work schedule, the executive must be able to manage large organizations and work with the diverse set of people in them. The executive should also have specific and achievable goals for their tenure. It is in these criteria and others that the MomentUM ticket rises far above the rest. The ticket’s time in both CSG and non-CSG campus leadership makes us confident that

they can competently organize CSG’s staff, programming and budget.

Lafrieniere, the presidential candidate, is an LSA junior currently serving as CSG’s chief programming officer. A data science major from Austin, Texas, she has worked on a variety of important projects throughout her time in CSG. Among them are the airport-transportation program AirBus, which provides affordable busing to and from Detroit Metro Airport, and a partnership with Uwill, a free teletherapy service for students.

MomentUM based its platform on three key issues: “Students don’t feel safe on campus, students don’t feel heard on campus and students can’t afford campus.” While the issues raised by Lafreniere and Quenioux were acknowledged by all the candidates to some degree in our interviews, this ticket set itself apart through its pragmatic approach. The MomentUM platform is divided into 30 different directives, half of which are action items and the other half being related to advocacy.

Ten school without some form of a student representative on the Board of Regents.

extensive deliberations on each of the five unique platforms, Lafreniere and Quenioux’s platform stood out not only in the diversity of issues it seeks to tackle, but also how clearly defined and realistic its action items are. Through their conviction, wealth of experience and connections to the campus community, Lafreniere and Quenioux convinced this Editorial Board to endorse their executive ticket. By prioritizing connections to the student body, expanding existing policy and introducing new initiatives, we believe their contributions will go a long way to expanding CSG’s role and rapport on campus should they be elected into office. THE

Quenioux, the vice presidential candidate, is an economics major hailing from Farmington with a wide range of past experience on CSG, serving as the deputy chief of staff, deputy programming officer for events and as an intern to the policy advisor for sustainability. As the current chief of staff, she oversees all Executive Branch functions. During her tenure, she spearheaded CSG’s subsidized headshot program and served as a liaison for the Central Student Legislature.

Lafreniere and Quenioux plan to increase the accessibility of CSG by scheduling more frequent meetings and holding open office hours on both North and Central campuses. Along with fortifying the CSGstudent body relationship, they want to strengthen the connection between students and the University. Their loftiest goal in this regard is to institute an exofficio student representative position on the University Board of Regents. Notably, the University of Michigan is the only Big

To tackle affordability, the pair plans to provide free busing to affordable and culturally relevant grocery stores, partner with Lyft to provide free late-night transportation and restructure SafeRide and other existing ride-service programs. Given Lafreniere’s previous experience working on the AirBus program, the ticket is well-suited to achieve such ambitious goals.

These objectives go hand in hand with MomentUM’s plan to reform campus safety. A revitalized transportation system and more off-campus lighting would make nighttime traveling significantly safer. Moreover,

MOSES NELAPUDI Opinion Columnist

Design by Avery Nelson

Liberal arts education is dying: Students need to bring it back

The college experience is what we make of it. It can be the opportunity to grow and expand our horizons both academically and socially, or for students to put their heads down and solely focus on earning a degree. I would argue that all students should strive for the first option. What sets students apart in the job market is not their GPA, but the soft skills they learn through lived experiences and extracurriculars — skills that can be achieved through a liberal arts education.

However, this holistic view of education is meeting its demise with first-time enrollment at liberal arts colleges decreasing by 0.6% every year since 2013. This contributes to a decline in focusing on soft skills and a focus on grades. We forget soft skills like communication, teamwork and leadership in place of technical skills like programming or engineering. Additionally, students are less interested in increasing their knowledge and are instead focused on taking “easy A” classes to boost their GPA. We need to shift our mindset about learning and pursue courses that challenge our thinking. In short, we need to bring back liberal arts education. In recent years, there’s been a growing misconception about what a liberal arts curriculum is. Contrary to popular belief, it’s an approach to higher education itself. Its goal is to view all majors from a holistic point of view by incorporating critical thinking and problem-solving skills from a range of disciplines. Humanities majors focus on incorporating technology and other hard sciences into their coursework, while STEM majors focus on incorporating more human perspectives to achieve a broader understanding of course content.

Students have a hard time seeing past this ambiguous term, with many already thinking they are well-rounded coming into college.

For example, the University of Detroit Mercy tells students that a liberal arts education is “an investment in their future” and then provides links for students to news sites about liberal arts education.

We can see a failure in approach by looking at the University of Michigan’s liberal arts college.

they come in with a major in mind or pressure to find one immediately. Thus, a lot of students end up taking filler courses that focus on boosting their GPAs without engaging in course content.

Unfortunately, higher education institutions have struggled to articulate the goal of their liberal arts education. Instead, they tell students that they need to take a certain number of prerequisites so they become “well-rounded.”

LSA uses a liberal arts approach by requiring students to take distribution requirements among different disciplines. These distribution requirements take up more credits for students compared to other colleges at the University, thus there’s more of a focus on the distribution. The website states that liberal arts education is “the study of everything … that prepares you to do anything.” The goal of LSA is to allow students to explore their academic interests, as students come in without a major and have a range of disciplines they can study.

Still, many students don’t take advantage of this freedom because

This extends to the “death of the humanities” phenomenon. As the price of a college degree rises, students want to go into a high-paying career right out of college. Thus, there has been an increase in degrees in computer science, engineering and other STEM fields. In these careers, students focus more on technical skills, not realizing that building soft skills is important, too. Employers in STEM careers place a strong emphasis on soft skills like communication and leadership. In a survey of STEM employers by Linnk Group, 72% of employers said they value soft skills as much as technical skills. A liberal arts approach helps students develop these skills, allowing students to see their coursework through a different lens.

It’s naive to assume that all students in LSA and in other liberal arts curricula are in a place to take classes outside of their major. Whether it be for financial or career reasons, many of us would rather spend our time focusing on classes in our majors and boosting our GPAs with easier classes that fill our distribution requirements. Many students think it’s hard to take intellectual risks in the current job and postgraduate program market, but institutions see past grades in ways students don’t. Deans of Admission from both Harvard and Yale Law School say they put less emphasis on grades if students take harder courses instead of taking “easy A” classes. In one example, Miriam Ingber, associate dean of admission and financial aid at Yale University, said she rejected a student because she took her firstyear Italian course in her senior year while being fluent in Italian.

teachers can be role models or guiding figures as students deal with the ups and downs of growing up. Teachers make educational institutions what they are, and they should be treated as such.

“A good professor makes all the difference.”

I’d usually contextualize that quote by telling you who said it, what their year is and what college they are in — but not this time. I think it’s safe to say that most of you reading this have either said that quote yourself or had one of your friends say it to you. The positive correlation between a good class experience and a good professor is undeniable. Scrolling through Rate My Professor and picking certain sections to land a specific professor are extremely common practices. Nevertheless, despite such a clear and obvious emphasis on the importance of professors, the good ones never seem to get the credit they deserve. Good teaching is crucial, not only for students, but for academic institutions, employers and even teachers themselves. Teachers, especially college professors, have the ability to elevate a student’s understanding of a subject effectively, given that they are traditionally experts in their fields. They can make the classroom a place students look forward to, rather than avoid, and can turn even the most monotonous of topics into lessons that inspire curiosity and shape dreams. Outside academics,

The last decade has seen a drop in the amount private and public universities spend on quality of instruction. A study carried out by the National Center for Educational Statistics shows a steady increase in administrative costs such as mental health and career planning services, intramural sports and recreational campus activities, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. While there has been an increased demand for these wraparound services, such as nonacademic resources provided to aid students’ physical, emotional and personal livelihood, they ought not to come at the costa of a quality education, because that hurts everyone.

The negative impact on students is obvious. For every poor classroom and professor they find themselves in, their development is hampered, their tuition loses more value and their future prospects grow dimmer. Add to that the fact that professors aren’t someone you see once in a while: Students who have to spend hours with an inadequate professor multiple times per week will quickly find the joy of college and learning being sucked out of them.

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As college students navigating the complexities of academia, we often find ourselves contending with formidable adversaries: seasonal depression, lack of motivation and high levels of stress.

According to the National College Health Assessment, approximately 80% of college students report experiencing overwhelming levels of anxiety, and nearly 40% grapple with symptoms of depression at some point during their academic journey. These figures underscore a pressing need to address the mental health crisis gripping university campuses across the globe.

During these struggles, the neurotransmitter dopamine is a pivotal player in the intricate web of human motivation and pleasure.

Dopamine, often referred to as the “feel-good” chemical, plays a central role in regulating our drive to pursue rewards and seek gratification. Its influence extends beyond momentary pleasure, affecting our capacity for focus, goal-setting and overall wellbeing. In light of the profound impact dopamine exerts on our psychological landscape, we need a novel approach to tackling the challenges faced by college students. If we better understand the neurochemistry and scientific research surrounding dopamine regulation, we can forge a path toward enhanced motivation, greater academic success and, ultimately, improved mental health.

Traditional methods to improve mental health include learning a new hobby, taking breaks from work, connecting with nature and honing time management skills. Engaging in hobbies, for instance, can offer a temporary escape from academic stressors, but does not leave a lasting impact on dopamine levels. Similarly, taking breaks and practicing self-compassion can alleviate immediate feelings of

overwhelm, yet fail to address the root cause of negative emotions. Connecting with nature and practicing time-management skills are valuable strategies — just not the best. The limitations of these approaches arise from a common scientific misconception about dopamine. What’s important, baseline or spikes? Baseline dopamine levels, the amount of dopamine in your system on average throughout the day, are responsible for your general mood and motivation levels. A stable dopamine baseline within a healthy range creates a positive mood throughout the day with plenty of motivation. Traditional methods to improve mental health often cause spikes in dopamine production. While most people would naturally think that baseline dopamine levels would increase after the spike, the opposite occurs. After the initial dopamine increases dissipate, we are left with a baseline significantly lower than before the spike. Engaging in sporadic, unsustained activities can effectively decrease dopamine levels over time.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out a hard truth: Social media is killing our ability to regulate dopamine. When we are scrolling through TikTok or get notified that someone liked our comment or post, we experience spikes of dopamine. Unfortunately, the byproduct of this happening too often throughout the day is that our dopamine baseline is drastically lowered. This reality, combined with poor long-term mental health improvement strategies, is leaving college students in particular completely defenseless against intense negative emotion and a lack of motivation when we need it the most.

To effectively combat negative emotions and feeling unmotivated, we should adopt strategies that increase and maintain our dopamine baseline. One great way to do so is viewing early morning sunlight for 10-30 minutes daily. If done consistently, this helps

maintain your dopamine baseline throughout the day. Another strategy is to boost your intake of tyrosine-rich foods like red meats, nuts and hard-fermented cheese. Tyrosine, an essential amino acid found in these foods, serves as a fundamental building block for dopamine production in the body.

Incorporating a diet abundant in tyrosine can effectively support your body’s natural dopamine synthesis, promoting sustained levels of this crucial neurotransmitter.

Consistent exercise, particularly strength training, is also extremely helpful in maintaining good dopamine levels. If you are really interested in getting the best dopamine levels and overall mood enhancements, deliberate cold exposure — such as ice baths or cold showers — drastically increases your dopamine levels for long periods of time. Consistently engaging in activities that trigger sustained dopamine releases, ones that increase baseline not spikes, also upregulates gene expression for specific dopamine receptors. This means that when we do these things, our body creates more dopamine receptors, making us better able to respond to dopamine and improving our average mood and motivation. Over time, this can lead to an increase in the density or sensitivity of these receptors, further enhancing the effectiveness of dopamine signaling in the brain. By fostering a consistent pattern of dopamine release through activities such as exercise, cold exposure and eating Tyrosine rich foods, individuals can support their long-term motivation and overall mental well-being.

The key point here is consistency. If the goal is to create a life where we are not weighed down by erratic dopamine levels with sharp peaks followed by much larger and longer valleys, then we need to create lifestyles to match that. Unfortunately, we aren’t taught how to do this.

Design

Design

Michigan

drops Big Ten Championship game to Michigan State, 5-4, in overtime instant classic

LYS GOLDMAN Daily Sports Editor

EAST LANSING — Heading into Saturday’s Big Ten Championship, Brandon Naurato was extra excited about where the Michigan hockey team was playing.

After the Wolverines had punched their ticket to the Big Ten Tournament semifinal a couple weeks back, the Michigan coach didn’t have much to share about his rooting interests for the Wolverines’ forthcoming opponents.

Naurato had one single comment: At some point, he wanted to go back to Munn Ice Arena.

Well, his wish was granted — on the biggest stage of them all, with a Big Ten Championship up for grabs. But Michigan couldn’t make the most of the opportunity.

In a back-and-forth game defined by momentum swings, No. 5 Michigan State (24-9-3 overall, 17-6-2 Big Ten) secured its first-ever Big Ten Championship, defeating the 10thranked Wolverines (21-14-3, 11-12-2), 5-4. The fifth meeting of the season between the two rivals shaped up to be an instant classic, in which the Spartans ultimately prevailed with a sudden death overtime game winner.

“I thought they took it to us in the third and made a big push,” Naurato said postgame. “We were fortunate to get out and tie it going into overtime, and then just one shot.

SOFTBALL

They deserve credit for everything they’ve done this season. Two good teams and a great atmosphere.”

It didn’t take long for the championship game to live up to its rivalry billing. Both teams played with pace in a first period that featured four penalties, two apiece, as emotions and tensions ran high.

It also didn’t take long for the Wolverines to get on the board. Just 59 seconds after puck drop, sophomore forward Josh Eernisse streaked down the right wing and found sophomore forward Frank Nazar III in the slot. Crashing the net, Nazar potted the first goal of the night to put Michigan up 1-0.

“When you score, you just get a bunch of momentum and a bunch of energy,” Nazar said. “When you come into a barn filled like this and as loud as it was, for us, we gotta build our own energy. Being able to go off those goals or penalty kills or blocked shots or anything like that, just trying to figure out how to get each other going.”

Less than a minute after Nazar’s score, sophomore forward Gavin Brindley netted what looked like the Wolverines’ second goal of the night, but it was immediately waived off for goaltender interference. And their one-goal advantage didn’t last much longer, as the Spartans struck back with an equalizer just over halfway through the period.

The game slowed down a bit at the start of the second period, with strong defensive play on both ends of the ice. Things heated right back

up, though, with five total goals in the second half of the frame. Michigan State jumped ahead around the halfway point, as multiple consecutive shots eventually led to a score.

Michigan created a number of good looks in hopes of responding, but the Wolverines couldn’t get anything to go, until a hooking penalty gave them their third power-play opportunity of the night. Junior forward Dylan Duke buried a rebound at the net front — where he’s cemented himself as a consistent threat this season — to tie the game back up at 2-2.

Riding on newfound momentum, Michigan retook the lead after graduate defenseman Marshall Warren potted a highlight-reel backhand shot top shelf. Once again, though, it didn’t last long.

On what was originally called no goal, the Spartans shoved in a rebound with about a minute left in the second period to knot the game back up at 3-3. Snatching the momentum right out of the Wolverines’ clutches, Michigan State scored again with just 0.7 seconds before the second-period buzzer, taking a 4-3 lead into the locker room.

“They scored another one, just chucking it at the net with 0.7 seconds, it’s tough,” Naurato said. “It’s a huge momentum shift going into the third.”

As was the story of the game, however, it wasn’t long before Michigan snatched that momentum back. Less than three minutes into the third period, Nazar buried

his second goal of the game with a redirect off of Duke’s shot. The Wolverines’ second line — composed of Duke, Nazar and Eernisse — had wreaked havoc all game, and it showed on the scoresheet.

With the stakes as high as ever, Michigan’s defense and graduate goaltender Jake Barczewski weathered an offensive storm from the Spartans midway through the final frame. Highlighted by monster blocks and huge saves, the Wolverines handled what seemed like Michigan State’s biggest push to regain the lead. After Michigan successfully weathered that push, neither team could net a game winner in regulation. The matchup headed to sudden-death overtime, giving the team with the last momentum swing the last laugh. And just under 14 minutes into overtime, with the raucous crowd in Munn behind them, the Spartans won the game off a goal from defenseman Patrick Geary.

‘She’s a bulldog out there’: How Lauren Derkowski’s competitive spirit has been integral to her journey

ALINA LEVINE Daily Sports Writer

A self-proclaimed foodie, junior right-hander Lauren Derkowski is living every food lover’s dream with the wide array of cuisine available in Ann Arbor. Having explored so many restaurants, but still having more to discover, you could probably catch her downtown grabbing a bite. However, if you can’t find her downtown, you can probably find her hitting the books at the library. After all, it’s not easy to become an engineer.

But, most of the time you can find her at Alumni Field doing what she does best — competing.

A veteran member of the Michigan softball team and the Wolverines’ ace, Derkowski has certainly made a name for herself, earning many accolades as a byproduct of her competitive drive. Yet her thirst for competition began long before she ever stepped into an actual pitching circle. It came to light when she was in elementary school on the sidewalks of Elmhurst, Illinois, where Lauren would throw a ball with her mom and older sister Julia Derkowski, both of whom are former softball players.

“She’s always been competitive just since a young age,” Julia told The Michigan Daily. “It was just us pitching on the sidewalk with our mom and me heckling her, yelling at her, trying to get her to throw strikes, and then her doing the same exact thing to me.”

But Julia saw Lauren’s competitiveness transcend far be-

yond those sidewalk moments. Whether it was playing the Wii U or seeing who could run the fastest in the backyard, Lauren’s ambition seeped into nearly everything she did. And so, following in the path of her sister and mother, who played softball at Methodist, Lauren took her innate competitive nature and funneled it into softball.

***

In her preparatory years, Lauren honed her skills at York Community High School, which only strengthened her drive to succeed. Her impressive distinctions there — a three-time team captain and MVP with 754 career strikeouts — earned her the school’s 2020-2021 Senior Female Athlete of the Year. Her stats on paper didn’t capture her true spirit, her insatiable drive to do better, to be the best. Hence, while still balancing her high school career and her place on the honor roll, she also decided to play travel ball with the Tennessee Mojo Club. And that decision was what opened her eyes to a clear path, a path that led to Michigan.

Beyond honing the skills of young athletes, the Tennessee Mojo Club did something unique: it assigned each player a different collegiate softball team to watch and become familiar with. Lauren was assigned none other than the Wolverines.

And so, after building her repertoire and leading her team to a win at the USA Softball Junior Olympic Cup, the No. 16 prospect according to Extra Innings was nothing short of elated when Michigan reached out to her.

“It had been my dream since I was 10 years old,” Lauren told The Daily. “So being here today, it’s just an amazing feeling. With the Wolverines, Lauren saw not only a team she was well acquainted with, but more importantly, a team that could both match and fuel her competitive drive.

Arriving at Michigan, Lauren got to see a higher level of competition and skill. But one thing that didn’t change was her unrelenting competitive nature, which held strong despite the elevated level of play.

In Lauren’s freshman season with the Wolverines, she started out as a depth player. While she still found opportunities to pitch — appearing in 19 games and starting five — Michigan’s pitching staff was dominated by righthander Alex Storako and lefthander Meghan Beaubien.

For most rookies, it may feel frustrating to be buried in the depth chart. This wasn’t the case for Lauren. Always eager to get on the field and compete, the competitor within her saw an opportunity to grow — a chance to learn from the Wolverines’ best, one of whom she was already familiar with.

“Growing up, I looked up a lot to Meghan Beaubien, who I actually got to play with because of her extra COVID year,” Lauren said. “I looked up to her not only in softball and as a pitcher but also for academics. … But, just getting to be around someone that you look up to and have watched for so long was one of the coolest things I’ve experienced.”

Under Beaubien’s wing, Lauren cultivated her own pitching identity, one centered around a mindset that would eventually solidify her as a starter in the pitching circle.

“I think the thing that separates her from the others is just her intention, her intention to learn from her mistakes and her desire to,” Michigan associate head coach Jennifer Brundage told The Daily. “She’s willing to confront whatever her shortcomings were and get better at that, whereas others may not want to talk about it or blame others. She takes responsibility.”

Lauren’s ability to take accountability for her faults and work swiftly to correct them is part of what makes her such a fierce competitor. And it’s part of why “Lauren Derkowksi” is becoming a household name. When Lauren receives feedback, she never sees it as criticism. She takes it to heart and looks at it as another opportunity to improve and become the best competitor possible. So it’s no surprise that her sophomore season was record-breaking.

Yes, that’s right, record-breaking. In her sophomore campaign, Lauren found an opportunity to prove herself, jumping from five starts to a whopping 30 by the end of the 2023 season. The surge in minutes was partially a byproduct of moving up in the depth chart. But it also was a direct result of utilizing every opportunity she got to prove herself.

In addition to tallying 223 strikeouts and a 2.12 ERA, one of her most notable accomplishments that season was throwing back-to-back no-hitters against Purdue on April 14 and 15 — games in which she also totaled 20 strikeouts across the 14 innings. With those no-hitters, Lauren etched her name into the Michigan record books, becoming the first pitcher in program history to record no-hitters in consecutive starts. Her receptive approach to criticism is what has continued to propel her forward in her career, and her jump from being buried in the lineup to making history is a perfect illustration of that. Lauren, however, doesn’t just want to propel herself forward, she wants to propel her team forward. While it’s an impressive feat to make history and shatter records, that’s not Lauren’s goal — her goal is to win.

“I really liked us in the third, and then in overtime a big factor of that — it’s been that way all year — but our crowd really energized our guys there down the stretch,” Michigan State coach Adam Nightingale said. “We responded multiple times throughout the game, between

SOFTBALL

being down, they had some good pushes for sure.” Michigan had just about everything to play for on Saturday night. The Wolverines were defending back-to-back Big Ten Tournament titles. They were facing their biggest rival in Michigan State, attempting to avenge the three-straight regular season losses at the hands of the Spartans. The Wolverines were playing for a trophy, but they were also playing for their reputation, for revenge, for redemption. And it showed. Michigan left it all on the ice, but Michigan State did too — and in a game of inches, the latter won out.

Jordan Klein: Michigan’s offense doesn’t need to be great. It just needs to be good enough

As it has been for the past few seasons, the Michigan softball team’s pitching is the engine for its success. Last year, the Wolverines finished sixth in the Big Ten in ERA, a respectable figure that should’ve led to a successful season for Michigan. It didn’t though — because success in one aspect of the game isn’t enough.

On the other side of the ball, the Wolverines failed to get anything going, providing absolutely no support for their stellar pitching staff. Michigan finished dead last in runs scored per game in the conference. Game after game, the Wolverines’ pitching staff and defense put them in a position to win, but their offense couldn’t deliver. With their pitching unable to compensate for their lack of offense, the Wolverines finished under .500 in Big Ten play — their worst finish in forty years. This season, not much has changed — because once again, the offense isn’t coming close to living up to its end of the bargain.

If anything, Michigan’s pitching has gotten even better. Returning right-handers junior Lauren Derkowski and senior Jessica LeBeau while adding freshman right-hander Erin Hoehn, the Wolverines’ pitching staff has posted an ERA of 2.39, placing them third in the conference. Regardless of who’s in the circle, opposing hitters fear Michigan’s pitching staff, as all three consistently put the Wolverines in a strong position to win games. But as great of a boost as that may be for Michigan, it means nothing without added support from its offense — which it hasn’t received so far this season. Failing to capitalize on the opportunities provided by their pitching staff, the Wolverines’ bats are still stagnant, and once again, they rank near the bottom of the Big Ten in runs per game. On several occasions so far this season, Michigan has wasted stellar outings from its pitchers, unable to muster just a few runs as opposing offenses are silenced.

“You build your team around

pitching and defense,” Michigan coach Bonnie Tholl said earlier this season.

The Wolverines have done that, but the building stopped there. Their offense isn’t likely to flip a switch and start knocking the ball all over the yard. But when Derkowski, LeBeau or Hoehn are mowing down opposing batters, Michigan’s offense doesn’t need to erupt into flames. It just needs to generate some sparks.

The Wolverines have seen what can happen if it doesn’t. Against Oregon State earlier this month, Derkowski held the Beavers to only one run in a complete-game outing. But Michigan couldn’t muster a single run of its own, failing to turn Derkowski’s stellar effort into a mark in the win column. And in a matchup with Louisville in February, the Wolverines blew the opportunity their pitchers presented to secure a victory over a team that played in the NCAA Tournament last year. This time, it was LeBeau who shut down the Cardinals — holding them to two runs, one earned. But once again, Michigan’s offense was silent.

Recently, the Wolverines’ offense has shown signs of progress. While they didn’t carry the load, Michigan’s hitters served as a helping hand for its pitching staff — scoring enough runs so that a strong pitching outing translates to a win. Against South Dakota on March 16, the Wolverines scored four runs in the bottom of the final inning to beat the Coyotes, finally waking up to back up the pitchers. And on Wednesday against Oakland, two solo home runs in the second inning were all Michigan needed to win, as Derkowski tossed a complete-game shutout. These are what most of the Wolverines’ wins this season will look like: strong pitching performances supplemented by an offensive boost to push them over the hump.

All things considered, these offensive performances from Michigan were still flawed. Even Tholl knows it: “We gave away way too many at bats today,” she said after the Oakland game.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

SARAH BOEKE/Daily

JORDAN KLEIN

IN-N- UT

Kansas surges late in overtime win, ending Michigan’s first-round win streak, 81-72

LOS ANGELES — Up by 10 points with six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, it seemed as though the Michigan women’s basketball team just had to wait Kansas out.

The Wolverines seemed like they had finally broken through and amassed a lead large enough to advance. But the Jayhawks’ 9-2 run in the next two minutes cut that lead down to just three. That diminished margin set up late-game heroics from guard Zakiyah Franklin to force overtime, as No. 8 seed Kansas (2012 overall) not only stuck around, but ultimately ended both No. 9 seed Michigan’s (20-14) season and first-round NCAA Tournament win streak, 81-72.

“Obviously, we had the momentum throughout the fourth quarter, which was very encouraging and I think we ended up getting up by 10 at the most,”

junior guard Greta Kampschroeder said. “But Kansas, they’re a solid team and you can never relax against a team. They weren’t missing, especially in the fourth quarter … Kansas was able to make plays and hit shots.” Early on, though, that momentum was up for grabs, as the elite defenses executed exactly as they were advertised. Jayhawks center Taiyanna Jackson shut down practically every action the Wolverines attempted in the paint, forcing Michigan to evade her long arms and misfire. On the other end, the Wolverines’ defense forced turnovers and errant passes. Defensive rebounds created opportunities for Michigan to run in transition for five points and a slight 11-10 advantage at the end of the first quarter.

To start the second quarter, Kansas began to make the Wolverines pay. Moving the ball against Michigan’s 1-3-1 zone, the Jayhawks converted on four threes to build a six-point lead. But to end the quarter, the Wolverines

found calmness on offense. They began moving the ball insideout and getting to the free throw line, getting Kansas’ bigs into foul trouble and taking a 32-29 lead into the locker room.

to hang around, driving to the hoop and staying within three possessions.

contest cut Michigan’s lead to just three, making it anyone’s game once again.

While Michigan didn’t pull away completely in the third quarter, its offense never regressed. Because senior forward Cameron Williams had taken the reins.

Kansas had already completed an improbable comeback, ending the Wolverines’ season.

After a 2-for-7 first half, Williams found pure confidence in the second half each time she touched the ball. Attacking 6-foot 6 Jackson, Williams calmly dribbled and spun to the hoop, banking in shot after shot to boost the Wolverines’ lead up to nine to end the quarter.

But that lead never truly grew, either. The Jayhawks continued

“Just keep getting stops, number one,” Kansas coach Brandon Schneider said. “I think that’s what really got us back in the game. Then we were in the bonus, so challenged everyone to just don’t leave the offensive end without a paint touch and an opportunity to get to the free-throw line.”

The Jayhawks’ attacks to the basket placed both Williams and sophomore forward Chyra Evans in foul trouble, relegating Williams to the bench with four — the only place she couldn’t impact the game.

And with just under four minutes remaining, guard Wyvette Mayberry’s third triple of the

“They had a really big fourth quarter against us, and we had, I think it was a 10-point lead, and they were able to get downhill and really get to the free throw line,” Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico said. “One of our game plans was to try to keep them off the line, and I thought we did an awesome job of that in the first half, but in the fourth quarter they were really able to go to the line. I think that hurt us a ton as well.”

In that fourth quarter, the Jayhawks took almost as many free throws as the Wolverines did the entire game, and outscored Michigan 19-8 from the line overall. They scored on all but one trip down the court in the final seven minutes, playing practically perfectly. Kansas called timeout to advance the ball, drawing up a play it’s gone to time and again.

But the Wolverines were prepared for it after a week of scouting,

eliminating the two primary reads. So guard Zakiyah Franklin launched a shot from the wing that bounced and rattled around — causing all of Galen Center to hold its breath — before dropping through the net with 12 seconds remaining to tie the game. Knotted at 67 apiece, it came down to one final possession, in which graduate guard Lauren Hansen’s game-winner clanged away to send it to overtime. The energy that had previously defined Michigan’s game transferred over to the Jayhawks, who quickly powered to a five-point lead. Meanwhile, the Wolverines fell flat, scoring just two points in the first three minutes and frantically forcing up shots, all while continuing to foul. Hansen’s three finally fell from the corner with just over one minute remaining, but it was too late. Outscoring Michigan 14-5 in overtime, Kansas had already completed an improbable comeback, ending the Wolverines’ season.

TAYLOR DANIELS Daily Sports Writer

Courtesy of Darrin Zhou Design by Leyla Dumke

Why I ran away to Italy

LUCY DEL DEO Statement Contributor

I think it took me all of five days in Italy to call my mom and effectively tell her I wasn’t coming home. I’ve been studying abroad at the University of Bologna for the past two months now, and while my friends here are starting to miss American university life, I really can’t say the same. It’s not that the Italian university system objectively functions better or that I haven’t experienced culture shock or cognitive dissonance; but by and large, my transition has been relatively seamless.

The people have been extremely friendly, willing to overlook my constant grammatical mistakes and happy to explain things over and over again. The city, with its towering doors and sweeping porticos, looks like a movie set in the middle ages. There is always some sort of vintage market, art show or musical performance in the many piazzas, and everyone takes advantage of them. The cafes are bustling and the coffee is fantastic. I,

for once, don’t even mind the small talk with the bartender when I get my morning cappuccino.

“Why didn’t I leave sooner?” I found myself asking my mom as I sat in the courtyard of one of Bologna’s many palazzos, the sky bright blue, even in early January. “Why did I never take transferring out of Michigan seriously?”

The moment I opened my decision letter lives in this special corner of my mind that is reserved for the memories that keep me up at night: my first kiss, the time I dapped up a guy I liked who was going in for a hug, the horrible TikTok I posted during quarantine that went viral — you get the gist. I hadn’t exactly been refreshing my inbox with bated breath, so when I clicked through my emails to the maize-and-blue confetti that announced my acceptance, it was a few hours later than most of my future classmates. I told my mom and my grandmother, and then went back to work on my AP Gov essay.

For many, seeing that confetti was a dream come true.

For me, it was a weight off my shoulders. I had been accepted somewhere — at the very least, I would be going to college in the fall.Now I was free to dream about the other 14 schools I had applied to. I was sure that my acceptance to the University of Michigan was the first of many. In reality, it was my last.

I went to a high school that worked us to the bone and then some, but there was some sort of pride in the suffering that we went through; we were ranked in the top three public schools in the state every year, and the teachers never failed to remind us how lucky we were to attend the illustrious Bronx High School of Science. We weren’t there because it was fun or even particularly academically engaging. It was a lot of spitting out answers like the goldfish you win at the state fair spits out air bubbles: habitual, but on the verge of collapse. No, we were there to get into a good college, and even if that wasn’t why you enrolled there in the first place, it was why you stayed — it was why I stayed.

I’m not going to regale you with college statistics from my high school —

that won’t do anyone any good, least of all myself — but I will direct you to The Michigan Daily’s own data project from a few years back. The Daily highlighted the 10 high schools that send the most amount of students to the University. Nine out of those 10 are in the state of Michigan. The other one? My beloved alma mater. Altogether, those 10 high schools make up more than 10% of the undergraduate student population here at the University of Michigan, meaning that going to Michigan wasn’t exactly considered exceptional at my high school, where exceptional was the expectation.

“Were you too white to get in anywhere else?,” my basketball coach asked me one day in late April, when the sun was shining, when my new shoes did not yet have scuffs. “You can always transfer,” said the adviser of the student newspaper, smiling pitifully at me as I handed in my edits. “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” my guidance counselor said, looking at the 16 other schools that had rejected me, many less competitive than Michigan itself.

Read more at

Design by Avery Nelson

Driving through the void

DARRIN ZHOU Statement Deputy Editor

The dog — a small, curly-haired terrier we were watching for one of our family friends — skittered across the garage floor. I packed my bags into my trunk. The poor thing, scared, probably thought it was getting abandoned, and so it did the only thing sensible to itself in that situation, which was to make a ruckus, yipping about. I kept trying to say that, no, my parents are staying, they were never leaving, but it was no use; he was still scared, desperate not to be left behind. It was a little silly.

Maybe I’m like that dog. More than I thought.

I’m almost about to drive back to university — down through I-29 until I hit Omaha, and then a brutal seven-hour stretch across I-80, covering the entirety of Iowa, before I merge onto I-94 and head toward Ann Arbor. In theory, I should be able to make the 11-hour drive in one day. In practice, I’m stuffing my clothes into my suitcase at 3 a.m. the night before: Should I bring back this sweater I’ve never worn once in

the entire three years I’ve been in college? Why not. The more the merrier.

“One more afternoon,” I often find myself thinking as I’m looking for my cell phone charger at 3 p.m., and yes, dad, I know, I should have been on the road four hours ago, could you please just give me a break, but that’s all I wish for: one more afternoon to properly enjoy myself on my last day at home, to maybe pour out a glass of wine (now that I’m 21 and don’t have to pretend I don’t drink to my parents) and celebrate a little, to say a real goodbye.

I pass the basketball hoop on my way out. It’s still new to me, even though it was installed in 2018. I used to play basketball with my dog there in the summer, which is to say I would shoot around and he would butt and paw at the ball, generally being a nuisance, which wasn’t something I appreciated. I would keep him locked inside when I went, but then he would bark at the screen door until I relented.

I found out a couple of winter breaks ago when my dad called me, crying, that he was dead. Surgery complications. It was the only time I had ever heard him cry. I had to drive to college days later — down through I-29 until I

hit Omaha, across I-80, then I-94 to Ann Arbor — and figured we would get a new dog when I got back. Considering my father is retired, I honestly didn’t think he had much else to do.

We haven’t. It’s been several years. His food bowl was still in the kitchen corner a year ago. I haven’t checked since.

I shot around on that hoop again last summer. It felt too quiet without him there, generally being a nuisance. I was hitting my spots more than usual: from the free throw line, a baseline jumper, but it didn’t feel fun. Too much was missing. I haven’t really touched that hoop again.

His body is rolled out in the veterinarian’s office; he has a scowl on his face. I wish I didn’t look. We had the option not to look, for the dog to be cremated, but I was too curious; now, it’s all I can remember about him. That scowl.

Regardless, I’m on my way. The road has a funny way of working: It always comes at the beginning of things and at the end of things. It is one of the only times in my life where I feel at peace.

I think my 8-year-old self and my father, when we first immigrated

from China, must have driven along I-80 from O’Hare on our way towards home — the same road I’m on now. I wonder what he thought, driving through Iowa — through the Great Plains, miles upon miles of farmland — for seven hours. We didn’t even know English back then, but there he was, driving westwards, towards the setting sun.

The Chinese word for home is 家。. The Chinese word for family is also 家。. He’s driving westward with the distinct knowledge of leaving a familial lineage tracing back 1,100 years in China, but he still says, “开回家” — to drive toward home. I suppose the word for someone who is family is 家 人: literally, 家-person. It’s a frustratingly recursive definition. The only person related to me by blood in the entire Western Hemisphere is my father, but I still call my rented house at the university home. I suppose this would make all of you my family.

I asked my dad if he was happy here, in America, a couple of days ago. We were in Pizza House, out of all places, at 2 o’clock in the morning; my parents had come to visit the school.

Design by Hailey Kim

In 1973, Leon Douglas was charged with murder.

Today, we got breakfast.

Jeremy Weine/DAILY

LIAM RAPPLEYE Statement Deputy Editor

At Kerby’s Koney Island in Rochester Hills, Leon Douglas took his coffee with a packet of Splenda and ordered scrambled eggs with wheat toast, substituting the side of hash browns for tomato slices — a healthy choice. As the server dropped off his breakfast, and former Oakland County Judge Fred Mester’s hamand-cheese omelet (with American cheese, of course), Douglas sprinkled salt and pepper over his plate and dug in. He had just finished telling me about his childhood, the moment a police officer yanked him off his bike when he was 13, alleging he stole the bike he was riding and beat him to a pulp in a children’s detention center.

“He continued to smack me until my nose was bleeding and my mouth was busted. From that day on,

I never had any respect for the police ever again.” He gave up his dreams of being a lawyer or a police officer. “Authority became an issue with me. That made me dislike them,” he said, with a now-retired circuit judge to his right. The judge scoffed.

Usually, judges and felons see each other in courtrooms, dressed in suits and robes with an obvious power dynamic at play. But here, at a run-ofthe-mill breakfast joint in a strip mall, they sat together in the same booth. The judge wore a United States Armyembroidered cap and a tie patterned with the American flag. Pinned to his jacket was a name tag — he had come from a retirement home. Douglas wore a zip-up hoodie and tennis shoes. The two are friends. They met years ago when Douglas was still in prison, and the judge decided to fight for his freedom. They met me and a photographer at Kerby’s to unpack Douglas’ deepest regret: a robbery gone wrong on Easter weekend of 1973.

Douglas’ gravelly voice contrasts sharply with just how friendly he is. He likes to talk. Without much hesitation, he told me about his arrest for felony murder, when, as a juvenile, he was sent to the largest walled prison in the world: the Southern Michigan State Penitentiary in Jackson. He was sent there after misbehaving at the juvenile reformatory he was being held in, and while in Jackson, Douglas continued to be rebellious, which got him into more trouble.

As punishment for mouthing off, Douglas said he was put in a “maximum security solitary where you have nothing in the room other than a hole that you defecate and urinate in.” While he was in “the hole,” they told him to be silent. “While being punished, they tell you for more punishment, you can’t talk. So me, being a kid, I’m gonna talk, and you can do what you’re going to do. Whatever the repercussions, I’ll deal with it,” he laughed.

Regardless, he’s talking now.

***

You cannot predict life perfectly. Nobody can. But, given the circumstances of Douglas’ childhood, most people could furnish a pretty accurate guess about where he was headed. No gene or DNA sequence indicates that someone will be convicted of murder, but when your grandfather kills a man, your father spends time in and out of prison and your grandmother is robbed and murdered in her home, in front of your family, that sets off a chain of trauma that is hard to overcome.

Douglas told me he had a middle-class upbringing where finances weren’t much of a concern. On his mother’s side, his grandparents “dabbled a little bit in selling liquor,” enough for them to be known for having money in Pontiac in the early 1900s. His grandfather was the first Black man in Pontiac to have a brandnew Cadillac, he said, and with peddling booze and owning a Cadillac

comes attention.

“A guy came in the house, stuck my grandmother up and killed her. Cut her throat and shot her because he thought a lot of money was in the house,” Douglas said. His uncle, 14 at the time, saw her being killed.

“Everybody else became alcoholics and died from complications and didn’t live to be older than 52 years old,” Douglas said.

This was the life into which Douglas was born: one of trauma and coping — comfort and uncertainty — in middle-class Pontiac in 1954. His father faced troubles of his own.

“My father, he went to prison as well, and I swear I believe that DNA has a lot to do with things of that nature,” he said. “I stayed in trouble basically, you know, being truant and incorrigible because like I said, my father was in prison at the time.” He took a bite of his breakfast. “What they say about parents not being in the house is so true.”

The server came around with two pots of coffee and asked if we needed more. I had forgotten we were at a coney island and not a private room discussing the facts of Douglas’ life, and after I got more coffee, I immediately forgot where I was again. I asked about his dad.

“When he came around, he was a decent father, but he was just a street hustler.” Douglas’ father worked and sometimes held a job, but eventually “the streets snatched him up.” Soon after, his mother and father separated, and Douglas started splitting time between his parents.

“My mother, you know, God rest her soul … but if she was living today and I was a kid, she’d be serving about two to four (years in prison) for child abuse,” he laughed, somehow, and I wasn’t sure if I could laugh, too.

“My mother was very abusive. It’s

what made me first start lying because I figured it’s best to tell a lie rather than get myself hit upside the head with a shoe, beat with a plunger, one time with a fishing rod,” he said.

As a child, Douglas was learning to forgive the unforgivable, to appeal to a higher power when he couldn’t bear the weight of it all himself.

“Can you imagine when someone hits you so bad and so hard and you tell God to forgive them for they know not what they do?”

This was practice.

“Can’t nobody tell me that it doesn’t affect you in a mental way. As you get older, you know how some people say, ‘Oh, shoot that was 60 years ago. Come on, get on with it,’ but you don’t get on with things like that, you know, it lives with you forever.” ***

Had Douglas been born a year earlier, in 1953, making him 20 in 1973, instead of 19, sticking up a bar and grill on Easter Sunday, I would not be talking to him and Mester. But alas, life isn’t perfectly predictable.

Easter weekend brought the friends and family together, he told me. The young men gathered together as families do at Douglas’ aunt’s house. For a moment, it was a regular holiday weekend family gathering until they plotted a robbery.

Douglas’ friend began asking everyone in the room how much money they had, but the boys were broke. His friend had a plan to change that. They knew of someone running an underthe-table numbers game racket — oldschool lottery hustling — who regularly counted his money at Harold’s Bar in Pontiac. The plan was simple: “Go in there, stick him up and get the money they had for the betting slips he did that day.”

It did not go so simply. When

Douglas and his three co-conspirators went into the bar, more people were there than they expected. They made everyone get on the floor. They collected the money, but on their way out, someone stood up.

“A guy tried to get up when he was lying down and my man shot him. Bam.” They fled and went back to Douglas’s aunts with their money, crafting a story for the rest of the family about how they got the cash. Behind closed doors, Douglas and the other robbers lamented how it had gone wrong. The man who pulled the trigger said he had to. He had no other choice. With a little bit of panic, they hoped the man didn’t die.

“Lo and behold, the next day I read the newspaper: Man killed in robbery on South Boulevard.”

While they discussed the details of the crime, a family friend overheard them. She testified against them, raised charges and Douglas, at 19, was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to life in prison without parole — the mandatory sentence for the crime of first-degree murder.

At first, Douglas struggled to accept it. He didn’t pull the trigger. He hadn’t wanted anyone to die. He and his wife, Gloria, whom he met in second grade, fought hard for his release, appealing at every chance possible, but for 50 years he believed his fate was death in a cell.

“I was dead in the water. And every lawyer that I ran into, they depleted my wife’s bank account. My wife’s 401(k). Everything,” he said. “She went bankrupt twice trying to get me out with these lawyers.”

Douglas and Gloria became close in seventh grade. After he went to prison, she married another man and had two kids, but she stayed in his corner throughout. She’s been his most fervent advocate. In 1992, after years of

fighting for him, they got married — in love, but certain that he would remain in prison. But after two bankruptcies, she proved to be a significant force in getting him out. Her brother happened to know a circuit judge by the name of Fred Mester, who was also monumental in the fight for Douglas’ release. In a reversal of roles and a twist of fate, the judge, who had “gotten tired of sentencing kids to prison and not doing anything about it,” gave Douglas a call.

“I was dead in the water until I met this young man right here,” Douglas said, wrapping his arm around Mester’s shoulder. And Mester, with his retirement home name tag still pinned to his suit coat, laughed.

“At least he called me young!”

Mester explained that in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case about a few 14-year-old boys who were charged with murder and sentenced to life in prison. The case, Miller v. Alabama, was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without parole constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

“I called (Mester) on a Friday and he told me, he said, ‘From this day on, I want you to call me every Friday. I’m gonna bring you home.’ And you know what? Judge worked that magic.”

Mester, along with Gloria and Kim Thomas, the University of Michigan’s director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic, took 18 months to get Douglas out of prison after 50 years of certainty that he would die there. Life is unpredictable that way.

The judge had high praise for Douglas and Gloria. “She had the faith,” Mester said. “That’s the great thing about Leon’s story is that he never lost faith. And he kept that faith in Gloria, too.”

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Jeremy

IRENA TUTUNARI Statement Deputy Editor

If I were you, after reading that title, I would simply shut down my device in a huff or flap the pages of my newspaper closed in emphatic distaste. No regrets? Come on, what a load of C-R-A-P. And to have the gall to write about it, no less? Who wants to read about someone who walks around willy-nilly without a single regret, not a dubious thought, not an inkling of desire to return to the past and undo that one truly mean-spirited thing they said to their mother or reverse the unwarranted betrayal of a close friend? Trust me, I understand the sentiment. Screw me and the high horse I rode in on, right? The notion of someone idling by without a trace of regret is almost laughable, if it weren’t so unbelievable to begin with.

To that, I’d like to raise a wary finger in protest. The bold statement that I simply have no regrets is not one I make lightly. I see regret as the lingering desire to turn back time and undo a particular decision or indecision with the intention of bettering matters in the present, past or future.

And I’ve spent many a sleepless night or a particularly long trip to the bathroom in deep thought about mistakes, Freudian slips and potential enemies I’ve made. Despite the many, many errors of my ways, there is not a single one that I would wish to erase or even do a little differently.

This is not to say that my past mistakes have erred on the side of minimal consequences or simple inconveniences; no, I’ve made some pretty sizable decisions that have resulted in some unfavorable consequences. I’ve lost relationships I cherish. I’ve lost the respect of loved ones — and I’ve even misplaced my own for a bit. But to avoid taking anyone through a comprehensive snooze-fest list of my grievances and woes (as that would not be enjoyable for either party), I will simply express the idea that I, like all people, have made some decisions that I’d prefer to only

I have no regrets

admit within the safety and confines of a confession booth.

So why — if I choose to be so dramatic and elusive about the veryfigurative skeletons in my closet — do I claim to have no regrets? Do I simply stomp around shouting “fee-fi-fofum” as I crush the hopes and dreams of myself and others without a shred of regret for the damage that’s been done? Well, that depends on who you ask. But really, the answer is simple to me. I have no regrets because, as I look back on all of my errant, ill-advised decisions, I see the good that has come out of each one of my past misgivings, both for myself and others.

And sure, I’ve made some runof-the-mill “bad decisions.” I’ve done things that have halted my life’s fickle direction for a moment, almost like microwaving a Hot Pocket and taking a bite before it’s cooled down; I burn the roof of my mouth, feel a quick and sharp pain, but in a few hours or days (depending on just how hot the Hot Pocket was), I’m alright again and am burning my mouth on, say, Rice-ARoni instead.

For instance, I’ve thought man, I should have had the guts to tell my gentleman friend how I felt about him! Or, goodness, I really shouldn’t have cared so much what others thought about me! I should have just been myself regardless. Or, um, to put it bluntly, I probably shouldn’t have spoken ill of others behind their backs (unless, of course, expressly warranted). I should have been more mature and had a face-to-face conversation. But all of these “shoulds and shouldn’ts” are as figurative and unreal as the skeletons in my closet; they only exist in the context of my own head. And these urges to behave differently aren’t consistent with my personal definition of regret; they align with a desire to be better in the future based on consequences I’ve suffered rather than a sharp disappointment and longing to rewrite the past.

Now hindsight, something I exercise when I chastise myself for mistakes made, is a gift that can only be given by time itself. Here is where

my understanding of things seeps into a rather meta territory: If I hadn’t made the initial mistake to begin with, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize it as one. I wouldn’t be able to look back now and think of ways that I would rather behave in the future. And frankly, if I were put in the exact same moment, within the same personal, social and environmental situation, I would make the same mistake 100 times over.

Why is this?

Because, as simple as it sounds, time can only unfold once. Every past decision that I disapprove of in the present, whether involving shameful action or inaction, could not have played out any differently, given who I was at the time. I couldn’t have overcome the fear of others’ judgment without having felt stifled by it first and realizing that I am not someone who likes to feel stifled. I never would have learned the detriments of talking poorly about others if I had not, well, talked poorly of others and experienced the detriments firsthand. There was no situation in which I could have extended myself toward a mature conversation had I not experienced the consequences of speaking ill of others to begin with. And, in regard to my gentleman friend, let’s just say it was a good thing that I kept my heart in my chest rather than on my sleeve.

Now, these poor decisions are all pretty mainstream; I hope I’m not being too bold in saying that we’ve all contributed to the grapevine at one point or another, or we’ve all felt inhibited by fear of judgment. But what about those consequences that aren’t as temporary as a brief collision between a Hot Pocket and the roof of one’s mouth? What about those decisions that don’t just temporarily pause the expected trajectory of your life, but completely derail it in an unexpected way? These bad decisions don’t just burn your mouth for a few seconds; they burn something bigger, something that cannot heal on its own.

I don’t want to talk about the worst things I’ve ever done, or the pe-

ripheral decisions I’ve made that have subsequently led to my worst experiences, but they do exist for me — and for everyone. In moments where my own decision is the line that separates how things are and how things used to be, it becomes hard to maintain a forward momentum. I try not to sit in this feeling for too long. So although I don’t walk around sporting T-shirts that say “Everything happens for a reason!” I do believe that I can create reasons for even the worst things. They may not outweigh the harm that was done to ourselves or others, and the good might not be evident at first, but sometimes it takes unnecessary hardship to illuminate the pathway toward necessary and unexpected goodness.

Thanks to the mistakes I’ve made, I can ride around on my stupid high horse and say that, to the best of my ability, I will never make the same mistake twice. I cannot fully understand the hardship that has come my way or that I’ve contributed to, but I know that I can accept it and be patient enough to heal what’s been broken and see the good.

As people, we like to think that we can predict alternate outcomes to things that could have happened or might happen — unfortunately, we can’t. Not to any realistic effect, anyway. As a means of entertaining the thought that I even could have done something differently in a situation (which I do not believe I could have), I have no way of knowing how things would really look. Who would still be in my life? Who would not have entered my life? Would I have walked out of an establishment a few seconds earlier and been crushed by a speeding motor vehiclist? I don’t know! And no one does.

So rather than condemn the skeletons in my closet and deny their existence, I hope that I can continue to shake hands with them, maybe even offer a high-five, and thank them for the life they’ve inadvertently created for me today. It’s a life I would never want to live any differently and one that I’ll never regret screwing up, messing up and stumbling my way through.

Courtesy of Darrin Zhou

The ghost light burns out

CYDNEY HEED Statement Columnist

I can smell it — some kind of faint, dry smell, almost like ash. I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what causes this smell … maybe dust burning against the stage lights? I don’t know, but all theaters have it. Even now, this smell does something to me. It activates something in my body. There’s nostalgia, but also something else.

I’m sitting in one of those heavy metal chairs with thin, coarse, largely useless upholstery in the back row on handmade wooden risers. The house lights are already dim. Audience chatter blends into a dull, irregular murmur. The setup has pushed me a little too close to the woman who invited me here tonight — an older lady, a friend of my late grandma.

I twist a small ring on my left middle finger. It became mine in the first days following my grandmother’s unexpected death. I found it in the top drawer of her jewelry box. My mom told me to take it; who else would want this particular ring?

It’s gold, but probably fake. A small golden band with two theatrical masks, one smiling, one frowning.

Grandma’s friend invited me here tonight because she knows we shared a love for theatre. Long before I got the bug, Grandma would take me to local productions. It was one of our things.

This was before I discovered the intensity, the vital force — a fullness of life that I have only ever seen live on the stage. This woman tells me that she thinks my grandma was lonely in her last months. I offer some half-response. That kills me, but the fact is, I wasn’t here. I was in survival mode in an intense, thousand-hour theatre program in East Jesus Nowhere, California.

I twist the little golden masks around my finger. This place still activates me, wakes me up.

But I also feel vaguely nauseous. Just sitting in this chair is exhausting, and it’s pushing funny on my back. I know some of these actors, and when I talk to them after the show, they’re going to want to know what my next project is.

There isn’t one. Who knows if there ever will be.

***

The air is buzzing. It’s hot. It’s dark. The curtains, the floor, everything is black, and the lights are all off. I can barely see the outline of my own body. I can hear the voices of the audience, but I can’t see them from behind the thick, black stage curtains. There are props haphazardly scattered around. The air has a subtle smell to it — I’m not completely sure what it is. Dust burning against the stage lights? That smell can still transport me. Sometimes I wonder if there’s some

magick in it that makes everything onstage alive. I’ve never felt that kind of life — vitality — anywhere else. Ever. That night, I became addicted to it.

Certain things come back as a full sensory experience. That show is one of them: the magnetic, electric stuff that was floating through the air.

This was my first show — a short piece about a bullied boy who finds improbable success in his dreams. I was 14 years old and one of two ninth graders in the fledgling Comparative Arts program (now known as Interdisciplinary Arts) at Interlochen Arts Academy — an arts-focused boarding school that was known around the world for the brilliant young artists it produced. Before we started performing, one of the theatre majors told me, roughly, that if I wanted to do theatre, there better be nothing else out there that I could do. It had to be my one thing. It was going to take it all.

Interlochen was a strange place for me. I came from a family where we received food stamps for a period of time and my dad drove a cab to pay my tuition. The other kids already traveled the world and I hadn’t even had internet access until I was 13; I felt a sort of condescending disbelief from my classmate when she had to walk me through how to use a flash drive. I felt awkward trying to critique musical themes and variations — I hadn’t even been taught what those things were

before. And my trademark sarcasm was read as negativity, causing those who barely even knew me to walk all over campus talking about how negative I was.

That year was miserable in ways it simply didn’t need to be, but I did find theatre. I tried out an acting class, and it was cool. I tried out another one, and it was life changing.

It was an introductory class, but this teacher did not mess around. I didn’t know much about various theatre pedagogies back then, but I was told that this woman’s class was very movement focused, that she expected a lot of hard work and that she had studied at a school called Dell’Arte.

“You must commit!” Her eyes would grow wide and her body would fill with tension. She wasn’t happy unless we had energy down to our fingertips.

“Don’t apologize.” This woman certainly was not apologizing — half the time, she was fucking terrifying — but I was amazed. I had been told my whole life that I was too emotional, too intense, that nobody would like me if I couldn’t tone it the hell down. I was simultaneously too loud and disruptive while also being awkward and antisocial, and now you’re telling me that I could just choose to move through life like this? That I could give that much, care that much?

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Courtesy of Pranav Desurkar