I’m Out January 22, 2009

by pegleghippie

This blog hasn’t been updated in a month, and I am heretofore committing myself to not updating it, with the exception of this post.  

What I’m saying is I’m done blogging, at least for a while.  Neither I nor Mekhami update often enough to have a normal readership, and our #1 fan,Pendel, has fallen off the face of the earth.  

I’ve been told that I’m a pretty good writer, but I want to be better, more diverse.  This blog has been great for my writing skills, as well as a place where I can organize my thoughts about any given subject, but I want to grow my writing in different ways now.  That means writing longer things, maybe some fiction things, poetry, who knows?  I just don’t want an audience just yet for the inevitable failed experiments.  

I may show up in the future, either on this blog, or on a new one.  I’ll still read blogs, and I promise my comments will be epic, they just won’t be centralized.  

All thanks and love goes to Mehkami, who started this thing, encourages me always, and has played devil’s advocate plenty of times.  Any drafts that I have I hereby give to him to do with as he wishes, and buddy, if you ever want me to edit a post or help you with an idea, of course I’ll be there for you.

Burning Quick and Loving it August 28, 2008

by pegleghippie

Classes are hard.  And I mean harder than they’ve been in the past.  All of my time has been devoted to class related activities for the last few days, and when I take a break to do something else, I fall behind.  That’s right, its the first week and I’m already behind.

At the same time, this may be the most enjoyable combination of classes that I’ve ever had.  Four of my five classes pertain to either my major or one of my minors, and I think all four of those are going to be memorable and exciting.  The fifth (economics) isn’t too bad either–I like the professor, I’m interested in the subject matter, and comparatively, it’s my easy class.

I transfered out of a useless public speaking class and into a government class taught by one of my Switzerland professors.  It’s about peace and conflict.  A friend of mine at another school is majoring in conflict resolution, but my school doesn’t offer that, and I figured this class would be the closest I could get. So far it’s involved examinations of how peacekeeping efforts can minimize unpleasant cultural side effects.  That means it’s 30 people discussing how to be peaceful.  It’s classes like this that make me feel like I’m at home in a classroom.

Leadership inspires a lot of what I blog about, and I have two leadership classes this semester.  One has been transformed from it’s regular approach of teaching how change works socially to examining the presidential race (you know, cause change is Obama’s slogan).  The other is on the history of leadership.  So both are about examining politicians and what they did.  Hopefully we still work in lots of leadership theory and methods.

Then I’ve got a class on postmodernist philosophy.  I like it so far, I’m beginning to understand what postmodernism really is (hint:  it’s antifoundationalism).  The class isn’t run like any other class I’ve ever seen.  For the first time ever, I am absolutely sure that psychadelic drugs will improve my work greatly in a class.  They’ll also make it fun as hell, but it’s not the first time that has happened.

So yeah, if I can control all that, all i’ve gotta do is balance in two (maybe three) clubs, a part time job, and being an SGA senator.  Free time and sleep is for underachievers anyway.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I got up this early so I could study (2 chapters of leadership and 3 journal articles in pomo catches me up to today’s assignments.)

busy today May 7, 2008

by pegleghippie

Ok, so our views are really going up, but in order to maintain that, we need to have continuous good posts going up daily, at least. Dear readers, I’m sorry to say that this is unlikely today, at least from dear old plh. Today is university study day, and I’m hitting the books hard to be ready for the coming onslaught (4 finals in 2 days, both days involve night-time exams).

Who knows? there’s a lot of hours to fill, maybe at some point I’ll feel inspired and I’ll have something great to write. Right now though, the best I can give is this apology, to our ever-increasing readership, and to my partner mehkami and myself, since I can’t keep up my blogging obligation all proper-like.

Pegleghippie enters politics April 28, 2008

by pegleghippie

(This shows up when you search for ‘politic’)

So due to some systemic loopholes, I am now a senator for the Student Government Association at my school.

Let me start by saying that by and large, I consider myself unelectable. I abhor the idea of campaigning, literally selling myself to people. I also take a lot of unpopular positions, pretty much summed up by my membership in the Green Party. While green politics may be increasingly popular, they are still just barely on the fringe. And I refuse to be dishonest about my political views; people deserve to know what they’re voting for. Hence, I’m unelectable.

So to become senator, I took a different route.  Turns out our SGA did a rather awful job of finding candidates for this year’s elections.  Only 6 people ran for 21 seats.  I was informed by a friend who was involved in SGA of this situation, and that the other senators would simply be confirmed.  Then I met with the newly elected president, who said all I had to do was to send in an application and show up at the meeting, and there would be a chance that I would get the nod.

So I show up at this meeting, see a few people that I know, and sit next to this guy, we’ll call him Ishmael, who I work with.  I could see why the elections were disorganized; the whole meeting was like a very polite but ineffective argument, mostly about procedure.  Eventually, they get around to confirmations.  One by one, we were called upon to talk a little about ourselves and what we wanted the SGA to do in the coming year.  One by one, people were confirmed, including Ishmael, who gave like, a 10 minute speech on what he was concerned about before they could vote on him.  Then it happened: someone was voted down.  It was a freshman girl.  She wasn’t really involved in anything, and didn’t really know anything about the school.  It was kind of sad.

Anyway, so I was the second-to-last one to be called up.  I stuck by my principle of letting the decision makers know what I was all about:  I hit the environmental angle hard, and stressed open communication between SGA and students, and the need to be more democratic within the school setup.  I answered a few questions, but the best part of the night for me came next.

 One of the newly-elected senators, we’ll call him Gary, spoke up.  Now I met Gary last friday when we both volunteered at the food bank.  We talked about various school programs and intelligence and good and bad in people, kind of deep topics.  We disagreed to some extent on nearly everything, but he struck me as an interesting, intelligent guy.  Still, I had known him for 4 days at this point.  Gary said to the senate that he knew me, that I was a highly intelligent, caring person who would be great as a Senator, and that I had his vote.  I was floored.  I had just received an endorsement from someone! I thanked him of course.  THEN, then, things got cooler.  A friend of mine, I’ll call him Samuel, stood up in the audience and gave me another endorsement.  I went to high school with Samuel, and he was a senator last year, and it was really just all too much for me to have ever asked for.  I thanked him too, of course.

So then I left the room while they voted.  I don’t know if the endorsements meant anything to the vote, but it meant a lot to me.  The moral of the story is, i guess, be good to your friends, have interesting conversations with strangers, and they’ll get your back in the future.