Student Views

Aside from a pseudo-breakdown early last week, life’s been borderline great for the last little while.

I won’t go into the specifics of my meltdown last Tuesday but lets just say it wasn’t pretty. Have you ever been on the edge and didn’t realize it until you got pushed over? Well that’s what happened to me. I’ve just been wearing myself down and spreading too thin. With the help of a couple great and level headed friends, I realized that maintaining some balance in my life is a little more important than I often realize. So this weekend I definitely took it easy, opting to chill out around the apartment rather than partying too hard. A little bit lame, yes, but when Monday morning rolled around, I was pretty grateful for my lameness.

It wasn’t a total lack of excitement though. My mom came to visit on Saturday to partake in a few of the family weekend activities. Mostly we just hung out and did a bit of shopping - got to love those free groceries! Well, and of course my mom’s company. We went to the ADPi Mother Daughter tea- it was so fun meeting everyone’s moms and being all cute with our tea sandwiches. Here’s my adorable diamond family! (minus Erin, the eldest… she was busy with her family elsewhere)

Photo by Meredith Henry

Saturday evening we also had a potluck cookout at the new Southwestern community garden with multiple reasons for celebration. It was a gathering to commemorate the first planting of food in the new plots but also to dedicate a new pecan tree in honor of Dr. Wangari Maathai- she likes to plant a tree everywhere she visits as a symbol of the impact that each community has made on her and she on them. Everyone put in a shovel of dirt, some people read excerpts of poems or spoke off the cuff to express the importance of the event; Leah read part of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” It was a beautiful moment, expressing the inspiration of Dr. Maathai, the hope for a healthy harvest and the strength and community of SEAK. That, and we ate some delicious food.

Photo by Shelley Dormont

LAST weekend was definitely a unique experience. IT WAS MY BIRTHDAY, which was fun, of course, but really - what good is turning twenty? I suppose I won’t have anymore teen angst… and at the least I can start counting down to 21 - 355 days left! The interesting part of the weekend though was attending the Clinton Global Initiative University in Austin along with some other SEAKers and SPA members. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from the conference but whatever it was, I didn’t get it. Call me radical but it was just a litte too corporate for my tastes. It was partially sponsored by WalMart, afterall. There were certainly some cool parts about it (Two things stand out- John Oliver from the Daily Show performed Saturday night and Shireen and I got to talk to him a bit- I talked to him about how much I loved this piece he did with the Kenyan ambasador - AND we each got free pairs of TOMS shoes) but overall I felt like it failed to encourage creativity in solving the global problems facing our generation. I prefer a more grassroots, out-of-the-box approach that really looks at the root causes of issues but CGIU seemed to advocate picking from a list of pre-packaged, bandaid solutions.

But having experienced CGIU only makes me THIS MUCH MORE EXCITED about Power Shift 09 coming up this weekend!!  I’ll leave the details for my next entry, just know that I’m having issues sleeping this week because I can’t even contain my excitement for the conference. Like, seriously. AHHHHH!!!