A big thank you to the DI for their coverage yesterday of the hug in and the attack, and their editorial in today’s opinion section. I’m glad the story got some press, even if it was a little late. Also, thank you to the readers here and everyone who cares enough to take this hate crime seriously. The more I talk to people about this, the more impressed I am with the people who want a response, want to be informed, and want to see something done about it.

I’m still waiting for a response from the university. But I can hear what they’ll say in my head.
ring

Warrior Poet: Hello?

Voice: Carl, this is Richard Herman and Joseph White.

WP: Both of you?

Whitey: Yes. We’re three-waying you.

WP: OK. What’s up?

Dicky: We read your blog about the hate crime.

Whitey: Nice picture on the217 homepage, by the by.

WP: Thanks. That was Roseanne’s doing.

Dicky: Score.

Whitey: Anyway, we wanted to talk to you about this “accident.”

Dicky: Yes, this supremely isolated event that didn’t even really happen to a “student.”

WP: Actually, Steven is a student. Although, I haven’t been able to find out if his attacker was too.

Whitey: Alleged attacker, Carl. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

WP: Of course.

Dicky: Now, as you are well aware, the Inclusive Illinois program addresses creating a more tolerant campus.

WP: Like, a hate crime-free campus?

Dicky: Sure, why not.

Whitey: So we wanted to call you to assuage your fears about hate crimes on campus, that may or may not have happened.

Dicky: Joe and I are very concerned about this sort of thing, and we wanted you to know we have it covered.

WP: How? It happened, didn’t it?

Dicky: That’s an interesting point. We’ll have the board of trustees set up a discovery committee to see whether or not this did or didn’t happen, then they can report to the trustees the results of the fact finding commission.

WP: And then campus will be safer, and measures will be put in place to prevent violent crimes in the heart of campus?

Whitey: Well, we do already have the QuadCam. So…

Dicky: And of course, the Champaign Police department.

WP: Yeah, I saw one of them give three guys tickets for jay-walking two days after a student was attacked because his attacker assumed he was gay.

Whitey: See? Crack down on Jaywalking! Wonderful, Isn’t it?

WP: Why don’t you have the student patrol just walk up and down Green St and some nearby cross streets from midnight to 3 AM? They wouldn’t bother the general student population because we know they can’t write tickets. But their presence would deter violent crimes committed against students in the heart of campus. I mean, the program already exists, so it wouldn’t be that hard to redirect those resources to making a safer, hate-crime free campus?

Whitey: The student patrol already has a purpose: Telling people to not have fun too loud.

Dicky: We’d have to set up a committee to form a committee to investigate the need for creating a prototype committee to evaluate the need for a committee to oversee a committee to do that.

WP: So…a massmail in response to the attack and a few empty gestures towards creating a more tolerant campus.

Whitey: Woah, Carl. Those empty gestures already exist. It’s called Inclusive Illinois, remember. We had like, guest speakers and stuff.

Dicky: And we can’t just send out a massmail for everything, Carl. You know I don’t write one for anything less than marginally racist greek parties. Or to tell students that there isn’t a snow day.

Whitey: Yeah, that was a good one.

Dicky: I mean, a massmail to inform students that there was a hate crime on campus and that something is being done to prevent it from happening again? That’s a lot of work. Every time I write a massmail it has to be copy-edited by the entire English department. That’s how they pull their weight.

WP: Adjunct faculty, too?

Whitey: No, they’re not real professors. Or people. They’re like migrant farm workers.

Dicky: And compensated similarly. HIIIIIOOOOO!

WP: So…no response to a hate crime on campus against a student in the LGBT community?

Whitey: We called you, didn’t we?
click

When I posted last Friday about the day of silence, I had just found out about the attack on a university student that occurred two weeks earlier. I thought I just, by chance and my busy life, hadn’t heard about the hate crime against a university student on campus. I was wrong.

As far as I know, the DI never reported it. I guess nobody had the journalistic acumen to alert the student population about a HATE CRIME ON CAMPUS. But, what’s two weeks late in print journalism, right? Maybe they did know about it, and just didn’t think we’d want to read it. I think that’s why they never do stories about the number or rapes reported on campus. It’s just icky.

But from what I understand of the attack, the perpetrator was caught and is out on bail awaiting trial. And the attack was on a university student. These two things mean that the University knows about the attack, and said nothing.

This makes me very angry, and I find it difficult to express this level of anger in this medium. The only tool available to me is caps lock so I’ll have to make due with that:

WHERE’S RICHARD HERMAN’S MASSMAIL WITH HIS EMPTY WORDS? WHY DIDN’T HE TELL ME ABOUT THE HATE CRIME ON CAMPUS? WHERE’S HIS FORM LETTER TO TELL ME THAT THE UNIVERSITY IS REALLY A SAFE PLACE AND THAT THE SCHOOL IS COMMITTING ALL POSSIBLE RESOURCES TO PROMOTING TOLERANCE ON CAMPUS?

You know what would be a good measure for the board of trustees programs in development for a more inclusive Illinois? How about going a year without a hate crime committed against a student? That’d be a good benchmark.

Now, I’m trying to contact several people to figure out why nobody heard how a student was called a faggot and knocked unconscious in what is, ostensibly, the safest part of campus. Maybe there’s a good reason that nobody said anything at all. Maybe Chancellor Richard (or as I call him, Dick) had a good reason to not tell us about the physical violence towards a gay student, but to piss in my ear all the time about racially-themed parties.

Now I’m in the blogosphere, which is the opposite of journalism. But as a side note to these last two posts, if something like this happens in the future, and nobody has the balls to say something about it, please, tell me. It turns out I’ve got a bigger set than Old Dick Herman.

Now, I’m not railing against old chancy because I think he, or the university at large is responsible for hate crimes. They’re perpetrated by individuals. But they are perpetuated by a society that says nothing about them. If you don’t stand up when something like this happens and say, “THIS, is unacceptable. I will not stand for it,” then you make it seem like it’s not that big a deal.

It is that big a deal.

Today is the Day of Silence, which if you don’t know, you should acquaint yourself by reading this Buzz article. In short, people are silent to raise awareness of the ways that members of the LGBT community are silenced. Partially as a memorial to the victims of deadly hate crimes, and partially as a call for action and acceptance of the community.

I will not be participating in the silence for two reasons: I’m not really a part of the community (much as I support their cause) and I have to go to work today, and my job is making phone calls.

But it’s an important day to me anyways. I once heard a (very wrong) man argue that the Day of Silence was a fundamentally stupid form of social demonstration. He seemed to think it should be a day of Speaking Out. That’s not the purpose.

This is not a personal matter to me, and yet it is very personal. I don’t stand for the rights of the gay community because I have close gay friends (which, not to diminish their contribution, seems to be the most prevalent drive among “allies”). I’m for it because it’s the right damn thing to do.

When I was thirteen, my confirmation class went to the taping of a Christian talk show called Different Drummer. When it came time to ask questions of the two guest pastors and the moderator my question was (roughly) this:

“In Leviticus it says that ‘A man shall not lie with another man as he lies with a woman. God hates that.’ How can God hate?”

The moderator and one of the pastors just looked totally befuddled, but the third pastor (a woman, I might add) gave an answer that allowed me to keep my faith (this was a big moment for me at the time):

“The Bible tells us that God is Love. And so what is not of Love, is not of God.”

I digress.

The Day of Silence is deeply moving to me. Because when I read about the victims of hate crimes, many of which go unreported if it doesn’t result in a death, I can not help but cry. When I think of how so many people are silenced. Through violence, or intimidation, or just plain oversight. The number of children who are just discovering who they are, but then are taught through bigoted comments and outright spite to sit down and be quiet. To not bother the rest of us. The rest of us “normal” people. To try to hide who they are so we don’t feel uncomfortable. The people, the children, the men and women who we treat as a nuisance at best. Human beings are capable of inflicting great tortures on one another, and so they often do.

When I read statistics about how gay teens are more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts. And then I realize that the word “attempt” doesn’t mean they always fail. I will admit that I’m crying as I write this, because this kind of suffering is different.

It’s one thing to hate a person. Hatred is actually a higher level of connection than most human emotions. To me the Day of Silence has nothing to do with hatred. It’s not an attempt to stop hatred. It’s an attempt by a group that is dehumanized to be recognized as what they are: Human.

From my limited powers of deductive reasoning, I think that human beings exist for one of two reasons: To harness nuclear power or to exalt the human spirit. I tend to lean towards the latter. And if I’m right, then there is not greater cause than the elimination of the depression of that sprit.

A student on campus was a victim of a hate crime two weeks ago. Right on Green St. Right where it’s supposed to be safe. I can’t stand for people to be afraid that way.

Tonight (or tomorrow if it rains on us too much) there is going to be a hug-in on Green St. See the Facebook event here. I’ll see you then.

I asked one of my professors today about getting back a project before the end of the semester his response was that the grading was stalled because:

“My brother in California just died, and it isn’t just that he died. My brother had a son with bipolar disorder and he needs a legal guardian. So I’m now his legal guardian and I have to go to a hearing in San Jose Friday. So the grading is low on my priorities.”

To which I could only muster the response of, “Of course. I’m so sorry.” And then I sat back down.

This man is an old sweetheart, the kind we wish our angry alcoholic grandfathers were more like. And he’s following the only rule I have for men, which is from the Godfather:

A man that doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.

My mom’s a teacher, my grandmother’s a teacher, my sister is going to grad school to become a teacher, my godmother’s a teacher, two of my five first cousins are teachers. I never had a problem with realizing that teachers are real people, and I think that’s why I had so many teachers in my educational career that I connected with on a personal level, I knew they were people.

But that mostly stopped when I came to college, except for maybe Oronte Churm, my creative writing professor. And it’s easy to disconnect from business professors. But now that I know this about this professor, I am amazed, and strangely proud of him.

He has to stand in front of a small class (people stop showing up this time of year) and say things like, “A small enough change in the limits on the objective function’s constraints will not change the optimal solution, similarly for a small change in the coefficients of the objective function.”

When what he’s really thinking is, “My brother died.”

I think about disconnect between people all the time, because I find it fascinating and I think that abolishing that disconnect makes for a more compassionate human race. But it’s hard to get past it. And even if you do, the change is often temporary.

I know you’re human today, professor.

I don’t steal music (anymore). It’s unnecessary, I have all the music in the world. But I do steal TV online. Like, all the time.

What I’m missing is more quality television. I own Deadwood and Rome, and about half of the Sopranos. All of the Joss Whedon duo (Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly). Also a fucking brilliant Canadian show (Oxymoron) called Slings & Arrows. And the Osbournes (SHAAAAAROOON!).

But it’s just not enough. There’s so much more out there. Sports Night? My So Called Life? (Hey, Fuck you, that show rocks). And most recently for me, Carnivale.

Carnivale rocks, it’s like Lost if the occasionally explained a thing or two. Anyways, I’ve been watching the complete first season in short bursts on Youtube all week. Of course, then I saw that the one and only video blog I subscribe to on youtube recently updated, so I had to watch that. (Hail Satan with Picklejar).

When I finally finished season 1, each episode in five or six parts, which is a lot of loading and searching and viewing, I couldn’t and can’t find season 2.

And I realized that there’s something simple that I could do, the way people used to get TV for free. Without this hellish, “internet.” It used to be called, the library. So I trekked out, and they had it.

Libraries don’t get enough press really. As we start to put the internet into our blood (not literally (yet)) we forget all about the things we used to do. I checked out movies once a week from the library in the summers when I was a kid. And then I just completely forgot about it.

I don’t think I watch TV like normal people (replace “watch TV” with just about anything and the statement still stands). I’m looking at character development, dialogue structure, and plot movement. The movement of intertwining story arcs, the balance of character focus and personality. This stuff is fascinating to me. I see a scene in Deadwood, and then I think, “That’s interesting that they chose to have Big Dan be the moral compass for the Doc’s character, while the Doc, in turn, serves as the perfect counterpoint to Bullock’s naivety.”

This is a ridiculous way to watch TV. But I love it. And people say TV is a way to tune out, but I disagree.

Now, where’s the new season of The Riches?

So I just watched my interview on local access TV. The UI7 news! Exciting, student and local content, brought to you by broadcast journalism students.

Did you know it existed? That makes two of us.

It’s a weird experience seeing myself on TV, even if my roommates and I are the only ones watching. It’s kind of like looking in a mirror and talking to yourself. But since it’s local access, it’s like talking to yourself with corks stuffed in your ears to garble the sound. And someone threw up on the mirror.

Actually, as it was my first time watching the channel seven student news thing, I wasn’t totally bothered by their shoe-string production quality.

I LOVE THEIR SHOE-STRING PRODUCTION QUALITY!

You should totally take the time to watch the channel 7 stuff. This shit is hilarious. One of the stories before the one I was in froze and the “anchor” looked totally pissed when the camera was forced to cut back to her. I don’t like watching nightly news programs without national stories, because they’re stupid. But amateur nightly news programs are hilarious. Check it out.

I also was contacted by somebody in ART 250, which I think is “Video with Writing” about interviewing me for something he’s doing. Like a documentary about environmental issues. So Randy and I are going to sit down with that guy tonight. It feels cool that people give a shit about this whole recycling business we started, especially since it is cool.

I’m still waiting for your call, News-Gazette.

So you might know this (as my frequent readers are my clients a lot of the time) but I’m a business man. And I don’t mean I’m majoring in business, I mean I have a business. I started a little recycling collections service with my roommate, Randy and his Buick. It’s a good little business that I don’t make much money off (sign up today!) but it’s pretty cool.

We pick up people’s recycling once a week from their door and then sort it and take it out to a recycling joint. People pay us a pittance to do this for them, and we like doing it anyway.

I’m just blogging about it because I a) needed to post and b) like the free advertising (email GoGreeninco@gmail.com with questions or to sign up!).

Side Note: I briefly wrestled with whether or not writing about my business was selling out, but then decided that first, my business is a part of who I am, and so it fits the overall theme of my blog; and second, it’s not possible for a blog to sell out.

I’m writing about it because I was just interviewed about it earlier today by a U of I student who’ll be editing all my curse words out and showing it on the local station (channel 7, I think, but who knows for sure). And she said, people don’t think you can recycle on campus, and I’m one of the options that proves them wrong.

I think it’s really cool to do this, because I sit on my ass a lot. I like working. I like the planet. I’m actually not in it for the money (though the money is nice). I love the planet.

Part of why I started the business was because over winter break I watched the sun rise with my friends, Mitch and Nick, and Mitch (who was still drunk at the time) told Nick and I that “everyone needs to realize that they’ve destroyed beauty.” As I looked over the subdivision that stands where a prairie used to be, I kind of got what he meant.

And there’s a lot of people who seem to think that the world’s problems are too big to do anything about. And that irritates me to no end. There’s too much that can be done to do nothing. You want to help the planet? Buy energy efficient bulbs, start collecting your recycling (or pay me to), and stand up for something.

Not that long ago, I spent a lot of effort trying to help a counter protest effort with the one thing I’m marginally good at, writing. I don’t know how much good I did, but I do know that I was deeply moved by the responses that I got, and the lengths to which people of my own generation were willing to act on their convictions.

Anyways, I started a recycling company so that Mitch could have a little better world, and I could feel like I was doing something (sign up today, and join the facebook groupGo Green Inco!).

This weeks installment:

Business Core Requirements, or W.A.T.B.S. (We All Take Bull Shit)

To major in business at the University of Illinois (which is like, a big fucking deal, apparently), there are a certain number of classes that you must take regardless of your major in order to graduate. These classes are called the “Business Core Requirements.” Many of them are “survey” courses, which means “like the first two weeks of the grad school class where you actually learn this topic.”

I recently read something very funny over at McSweeney’s which was a bunch of movies rewritten in three lines or less. I will do the same here for the business core classes I have taken:

Econ 102 w/ Fred Gottheil : Fishing, tongue cluck, tongue cluck, fall asleep, TA without English, fishing, tongue cluck, Canada.

Econ 103 w/ Joe Petry: (No description possible. Joe Petry’s voice put everyone to sleep)

Econ 203 : Same as above.

CS 105: Everything you need to know about computer programming (in 1987).

Stat 100: Took it in high school AP MUTHA FUCKA!

Math 220 (Calculus?): Same as above. But cooler.

Fin 221 w/ Mike Dyer: Money is important, and Mike Dyer is the Santa Claus of the college of business. Also, Dyer’s name puts the Zepplin song, “D’yer Maker” in my head. (What, you don’t like Zep?)

Math 125 w/ Tom Carty: Tom Carty is part Jesus (if he’d gained a little weight in his early 40’s) and part Penn, from Penn & Teller. Actually, Just Penn. Also, matricies.

Intro to Public Speaking: Who care’s if you’ve performed in front of more than 10,000 people, Carl? How well can you write a fucking outline?

Legal Environment of Business: I actually learned things about Law. Unfortunately, the tests for the class had little to do with law. Much more to do with academic articles the John Kindt wrote himself.

Accounting 201 and 202: You need to have an accountant, but you don’t want to be one.

Special Mentions:

Intermediate Economic Theory: I loved this class and thought it was completely fascinating. I have nothing bad to say about it. Way to go.

Management and Organizational Behavior: I can’t put this class into three lines or less. First of all, like most classes that blow hardcore (and not in a good, deepthroat, kind of way) it’s enormous. I don’t think anyone can learn anything when there are more than, say, 500 other people around. Except that Donald Trump stole your money at the Learning Annex. Secondly, a good portion of the lecture is movie clips. Of course, I miss them, because I’m busy watching Deadwood on DVD. Or blogging (my readers come first). Lastly, this class is a collection of business buzzwords like “flat structure,” “transformational leadership,” and “management by context.” Of course, without real instruction on WHAT THE FUCK THOSE THINGS ARE. Here’s a real practice test question:

1. All of the following are types of departmentalization, EXCEPT:
a. Customer
b. Product
c. Structural
d. Regional

Now you might not know the answer to this if you aren’t a business student (it’s “structural”), but suffice it to say the question is basically a congress of four vocab words. This is what I commonly refer to as “busy work” or “things I stopped doing when I turned 12.”

Sounds like a bunch of bullshit?

The average starting salary for graduates with my major went up to $42,000 last year.

A good friend of mine summarized (satirized) the format of my blog yesterday as:

“I was listening to this moderately obscure, but very good song while I was doing this totally inconsequential thing, and upon reflection, realized it had a much deeper significance.”

Now, this isn’t going to stop, but I’ve decided to switch it up a bit with a time-honored tradition in short-format writing: Bitching about stuff.

Now, this should be easy, because I do it all the time in real life. But putting it into the written word isn’t quite as familiar to me. So before I start the short series that I’m planning on my life as a business major starting this weekend (It will be called “Majoring in Business, or How To Get Rich Without Friday Classes), I wanted to get a little practice in humorous expository whining. So here goes:

This is me for the next couple of posts.

Stop inviting me to facebook applications. I will kill you if you ask me to be a zombie, vampire, or knight. I don’t want your shitty bumperstickers, your funwall posts, or your third-grade quality sketches. And I don’t need to know who has a crush on me, who thinks I’m hot, or how you rate me as a human being relative to your other friends. Facebook is for one thing, pictures of drunk people, and keeping tabs on people you’ve slept with (”one thing” is not a typo, the second is a subset of the first). Everything else is irrelevant.

Wikipedia refuses to let me kill Norm MacDonald, and, to add insult to injury, sent me this scolding:
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did to Norm Macdonald (comedian). Your edits appeared to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you.

First of all, a bunch of those words were hypertext in the original message. They’re so self-serving, that even when they’re yelling at me, they provide me with links to potentially useful information about “vandalism.”

Hey, Wiki! I know you guys are all for the democracy of information. You want people to have the truth at their fingertips. I think that’s very noble of you.

But I wanted to kill Norm MacDonald before he could become a has-been. I wanted people to have the truth as it should be at their fingertips. Isn’t that more noble? Write an entry on nobility, and get back to me.

And lastly in my complaints: Blogs. I know this seems hypocritical (because it is) but the more time I spend trying to learn how to be a better blogger from Maddox or Stuff White People Like, the more I realize that blogging is completely masturbatory. I Googled “better blogging” and all the suggestions I found were about how to get people to put your blog on “RSS Feed” (which I still don’t understand) or getting other bloggers to put you on their “blog roll” (circle-jerk). There’s tons of ways to have your blog get more pageviews (2,000 last month for me, BooYa!). Nothing is about how to write quality content and get loyal readers. In fact, most of it suggests that it’s better to post twice a day at half the quality.

So keep reading and tell your friends about warrior poet. And add me to your blog roll.

I walked to my one class today, and was originally listening to the Ike Reilly Assassination (which rocks), but said, “I need something more summery,” for the warm weather today. So I put on John Butler Trio (which also rocks). The first song off Grand National is “Better Than,” which I’ve always liked but never listened that closely to, and when I did today, I realized it’s the perfect song for summer.

The song is one of many great “live in the moment” songs. It’s about learning to be satisfied with what you have. Including a line I’d never noticed before today, “I know the grass is greener, but just as hard to mow.” Granted, mowing a lawn isn’t an extremely poetic image, but it works.

It got me thinking about how my mindset changes with the season. In the summer time, I’m perfectly capable of sitting around for an entire day, listening to music and drinking coffee, barbecueing for dinner, and watching the grass grow. In the winter or fall (thanks to global warming, there isn’t really a spring, temperatures just go from 45 to 70 in a week, apparently) I’m more introspective, more of a muckraker, in the classic definition (as opposed to the yellow journalism one).

There’s something wonderfully healthy about doing nothing, but I don’t do it often enough. And when I’m focusing from production to test to project to production to homework to party (even parties can be work), I don’t spend enough time navel gazing.

Navel gazing is a term I learned from Professor Oronte Churm (check out his stuff at McSweeney’s here) for a bad type of writing. It’s when a character in fiction sits and thinks about stuff in a poor attempt to put a little more philosophy into your writing, and it usually bores the reader to tears. This is exactly the kind of writing I usually do. It’s called navel gazing because nothing is happening to the character, except staring at his belly-button.

Summer is the perfect type to not just do this kind of writing (keep reading my blog this summer!) but to actually do it in real life.

So another two weeks, and then summertime. And the living will be easy.