...is a giant mess. It's a sort of organized mess, though. It's been this way for about a month and a half now.
First of all, let me start out by saying that I didn't get the Fulbright. That being said, I'm not torn up about it. Yeah, it sucks that I don't get to go to Vienna but actually I think I would have done a lot of floundering there. There are a lot of things that I would have missed terribly back here and plus, this just means that I can start school even sooner and get out into the real world even sooner. So that's update number one.
For the rest of my life, these are probably things that I should have been updating all along but it just makes me rage so I couldn't find the time or energy to do such things:
It all started about a month and a half ago with a single phone call that said this whole ordeal was going to last a week (bahahah!) There was a resolution in the Student Senate that attacked the director of OIIR (the office I work for on campus) calling out her and some other administrators for acting unethical when dealing with the RSO Students for Chief. They were placing this argument in a discourse of first amendment rights and freedom of speech (which was BS). I decided to speak out about it in a couple of student senate meeting. Unfortunately my opinion was the dissenting opinion of the time and was not the most popular (though I am wont to think it was the right opinion) and therefore, because people in power and in the know didn't like what I was saying, they decided to use some silencing tactics on me.
The following week I was subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which meant that someone wanted to see what I was sending in my emails and texts. Luckily because I'm a student (though also a worker), I was protected by FERPA (which is an acronym for some sort of confidentiality of school stuffs which I don't remember). The fact is, though, that this was an attack on my integrity and ethics as well as, like I previously said, a sly way of silencing me without blatantly abridging my own first amendment rights - the very rights "they" claim to want to be protecting. Whose student rights do they care about - those who agree with them only?
Also, along with all of this, I have personally been attacked as having been working for OIIR and people assuming that I've been sent to these meetings on behalf of administrators. Which is not at all true. It's amazing how I can't have my own opinion, and when I voice an opinion (though it's probably not mine, according to some) I get attacked. Crazy logic.
Then the Student Senate put another resolution on the table called the Unity Resolution that called for a committee to try to find another symbol, mascot, or emblem (choose whichever word suits you) in order to mend the rift that has plagued our school. Of course, those who want to preserve and bring back the Chief are up in arms about that as well. So of course, I decide that those tactics of silencing are certainly NOT going to work and I write an editorial to the Daily Illini, our school newspaper. There I'm also attacked and told that I don't know what "pain" is. you can check out the DI editorial here.
Anyway...this is the sort of thing I've been dealing with that have negatively made me rage and be angry. On the up-side...I'm Ally of the Month for April which is a pretty big honor for me. Plus, I've got a lot of support from people around me throughout this whole thing. And I got into Wash U's program (I don't even know if I've mentioned that yet) which is SUPER EXCITING.
Well for now that's the update. I'm hoping to go into more detail on some of the FOIA stuff for sort of posterity reasons but also because I think it's good information to have as a resource.
But i'm sleepy now...so I'm signing off.
love,
me
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