“Third Eye Blind (frequently abbreviated 3eb) is an American alternative rock band formed in the early 1990s in San Francisco. The band’s current line-up is Stephan Jenkins (vocals, guitar), Brad Hargreaves (drums, percussion), Tony Fredianelli (guitar, vocals), and Leo Kremer (bass guitar, vocals).” (From Wikipedia)
They’re playing tonight at 8pm right in Timesquare’s Nokia Theatre.
It’s going to be magical.
As for the weekend, I’m going back to NYC to check out the Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday. The last time I went, I was still too young to really appreciate what was happening around me (I think I was more into the street performers/face painters) This time, I’m planning to make it extremely worthwhile… hopefully catch a few short film screenings and indie band performances.
More on these later.
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A college professor reminds her class of tomorrow’s final exam…
“Now class, I won’t tolerate any excuses for you not being here tomorrow. I might consider a nuclear attack or a serious personal injury, illness, or a death in your immediate family, but that’s it. No other excuses whatsoever!”
A smart-ass in the back of the room raised his hand and asked,
“What would you say if tomorrow I said I was suffering from complete and utter sexual exhaustion?”
The entire class is reduced to uncontrollable laughter and snickering.
When silence is restored, the teacher smiles knowingly at the student, shakes her head and sweetly says,
“Well. In that case, I guess you’d have to write the exam with your other hand.”
Filed under: Noteworthy, Stress Relief | 2 Comments
There’s a bunch of these time-lapse projects currently circulating the internets, but I think this one might be one of the longest-spanned (or so he claims) I’ve come across. Check it out! Artist JK Teller took a photo of himself every day for 8 years and then compiled them into this:
And here’s his blog: C 7 11 23
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America, the beautiful. Right? They say we are a nation of opportunity, equality, and meritocracy. Well, we ain’t perfect neither. If you dig deeply enough, you’ll find that beneath this seductive veneer lies a grim and violent past that we’re still trying to patch up as it continues to affect our generation’s college-hopefuls.
Barely fifty years ago, there were laws in the U.S. that prevented racial minorities (African Americans, Asian Americans, maybe even people from our own families) from enrolling in top universities and pursuing well-paying careers. Since then, civil rights activists (cue Martin Luther King Jr.) have succeeded in abolishing these racial barriers, and now we are basking in the fruit of their epic labors. Our school’s diverse student body is living proof of that.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first of many new laws to ban discrimination in American education and employment. Blah blah blah. Eighth grade social studies took care of this. So why does it matter, you ask? Because something called affirmative action has become the most misunderstood civil rights issue of our time. Many say that it’s been a blessing and a curse. Where will you stand?
What is Affirmative Action? In layman’s terms, affirmative action is discriminating the discriminated. Others say it’s backwards favoritism. Confused yet? OK, let’s start from the beginning. It’s 1961, and John F. Kennedy has just coined the term affirmative action, which means that not only would minorities be treated equally under the law, they would also get first dibs on everything they never had first dibs on to begin with. This included education, employment, and housing opportunities. Even in those early days, JFK’s new policy worked like a charm.
The Controversy. “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” Since the 1970s, affirmative action has become an exceedingly hot topic for debate. If you’re news-savvy, you’ll know that the issue has made its way into crossfire court trials and hardcore politics. Basically, opponents of affirmative action see it as an unfair way of punishing white people for the “sins of the past.” And if you think about it, that’s a good point. Affirmative action is a walking contradiction. By definition, this “preferential treatment to people of a particular group” violates the very principles by which it was created. So what gives?
Uncivil Rights: An Asian American Standpoint. These past few years have witnessed ever-intensifying competition in the college admissions environment. Many Asian American students are discovering (quite disturbingly) that affirmative action policies and other race-based quota systems are wreaking havoc on their education plans.
According to Fred Pincus’s Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth, the growing Asian American student population is scaring many universities into rejecting highly qualified (even overqualified) students via the quota system. In other words, there’s a limit to the how many Asians can get accepted to a given school. Universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Brown, U.C. Berkeley, and UCLA have done it to the point where Asian American students are forced to respond in much more creative ways when applying for college.
A Little Strategy Goes a Long Way. As featured in a recent article from the Washington Post, one student’s college application story will no doubt inspire. She, a Chinese American high school senior, feared that the Ivy Leagues would not notice her because nothing set her apart from her graduating class, 22% of which were Asian Americans with GPAs of 3.8 and higher. As a last resort, she and her family moved to a new town where the average SAT score was about 300 points lower, and the majority of residents were Caucasian. She also entered a beauty pageant (a most uncharacteristic endeavor for the bookish scholar) to spice up her college application. It worked. She graduated as class valedictorian, won the pageant, and got early acceptance letters to Yale and MIT.
Despite the fairy-tale ending of this girl’s story, thousands of other college-bound Asian American students will no doubt experience what she so luckily avoided.
Skin-Deep. If you’ve ever said, “Oh, it’s because she’s Asian,” as a way to explain a person’s intelligence, you’re simply perpetuating the “Asian nerd” stereotype. That puts tremendous amounts of pressure on us, and gives society the idea that Asian Americans are the “model minority,” as Newsweek and 60 Minutes have both proclaimed. Although that sounds incredibly flattering, a closer look at the statistics tells us otherwise. You would be surprised to learn that Southeast Asians have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the country.
Statistically speaking, Filipino Americans (this includes me personally, a branch off the Asian tree, so to speak) actually have a greater college admissions advantage (however marginal that may be) because our Spanish-sounding last names often mislead admissions officers into believing we are Hispanic.
Clearly, Asian American attempts to sidestep racial quota systems take a lot of planning and preparation. Not only do they have to work twice as hard to beat the demographics, they face serious competition within their own ethnic group. As a result, Asian American college applicants have to meet the highest admissions standards nationwide at all levels of undergraduate and graduate school selectivity.
The Unbiased Opinion. I personally support affirmative action, and here’s why in a nutshell. You might think it’s because I’m Asian or Filipino, but it’s deeper than ethnic pride. The goal of affirmative action is to give people that have had a history devoid of opportunities the chance to improve their lives and the lives of future generations. Unfortunately, this does not mean that affirmative action guarantees successful outcomes. It’s about being able to run the race, not winning it.
Asians are not the only group to have been hurt by racial quota systems. But for now, the task of promoting diversity in this world requires favoring underrepresented minorities. There’s no “punishment” towards whites involved in this equation. We need to realize that change will come when people start working together to create more opportunities in education, the workforce, and society –rather than hide behind the belief that one person’s gain is another’s loss. That’s reality.
Works Cited
Chen, James. 2005. “Asian Americans and Affirmative Action.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/08/asian_americans_and_affirmativ.html. (9
March 2008).
Greene, Howard and Matthew Greene. Making It Into A Top College. New York: HarperCollins,
2000.
Le, C.N. 2008. “Affirmative Action and Asian Americans.”
http://www.asian-nation.org/affirmative-action.shtml. (March 10, 2008).
Pincus, Fred L. Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth. Lynne Rienner Pub., 2003.
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The Girl
the fail blog
Maria. Sixteen. Filipina. New York. Clean freak. Liberal. Dramione. Peach yogurt. 
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