February 9, 2007

• APU is Hard?

  Last week in APU’s newspaper “The Clause” I read one of the most lame articles I’ve ever come across. Below is the heinous article in it’s entirety, along with a GREAT letter to the editor that was published in today’s edition of “The Clause” in rebuttal.

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  IF ONLY LIFE WAS EASIER

  ARIEL FORTUNE | news editor

  
  I messed up my
  chapel card again. I filled in the “zero” bubble instead of the “two” on my
  chapel card. One little mistake and my entire existence at this chapel is in
  jeopardy. I lean over to ask my best friend if she has an eraser but I see a
  chapel patrolman eye me down. There goes that idea.

  Busted.

  I think to myself of various ways I can shift around my schedule, leave early
  from one of my two jobs or pay someone to attend chapel for me in the next two
  days. I cannot miss another chapel this week.

  Do you ever wish APU just made your day a little bit easier?

  As a freshman, I was very ill one weekend but was unable to receive any true
  clarity for my sickness. By the time I was able to locate the Health Center
  I had contemplated turning back. Something about the sign labeled “Office of
  Study Abroad” just did not strike me as a place for getting shots or taking
  your temperature.

  As college students, we carry a very heavy load. For many of us the constant
  vigor of classes, two jobs and an indispensable social life leave us no room
  for fooling around. While we cannot decrease the homework load or simply refill
  our wallets with cash we do not have, it seems there has to be something APU
  can do to make our days more hassle-free.

  “There should be a gondola between East and West,” senior international
  business major Kyle Bishop said. “Or a zip line if that costs too much.”

  Granted, we could also play the Top 40 every night on the trolley or serve
  filet mignon and crème brulee in the Den, but this is unlikely to happen.
  However, there are a few changes APU could look into, besides creating a lengthy
  water canal for couples to rendezvous between classes. Instead of taking your
  girlfriend out to dinner, you could simply ask her if she wants to go to West.

  Young couples could celebrate their engagement by riding hand in hand on the
  gondola down Citrus and over Foothill. During Spring, we would probably need
  two gondolas.

  We could employ the friendly individuals at the front gate on East as gondola
  guides. I always get so confused driving into the front gate. Where is the
  lollipop with that wave? Why not hand out some candy?

  Speaking of food, why is it that lunch and dinner at the cafeteria seem so
  expensive? I mean, have you ever forgotten your identification card? It is
  like, “Let me see your I.D. or fork over your life savings.”

  “I think there should be some way for us to just purchase the salad bar,”
  Bishop said.

  Perhaps we need a monitor where you can manually touch a button labeled “salad
  bar” and enter your I.D. number. We could fingerprint everyone like they do at
  local tanning salons. Rarely do students go anywhere without their hands.

  But getting past the front may not be your biggest problem. It is when you get
  in to find there is no chocolate milk and no bagels. You consider the fries but
  decide against it when you recall earlier last week when you squirted ketchup
  all over your new shirt by trying to open a million little ketchup packets. By
  the time you were able to get a decent amount of ketchup on your plate, you
  were fatigued, no longer hungry and filthy. Why does someone not do us all a
  favor and get a big ketchup dispenser like the ones at McDonald’s.

  Eventually you realize the ketchup dilemma is going to have to wait because you
  have a class in Duke at 1:05. You have to hurry. At 1:45 you are still standing
  in front of room 224. You step to the classroom on the right and it reads 287.
  You need room 234. What is going on? Perhaps if we stood long enough the
  classroom will appear like the Marketplace did in Harry Potter. Why not just
  label the doors one, two, three and four?

  “They go from one number to another and you have no idea how it makes sense.
  You can just count on getting lost,” senior applied health major Laura Heiner
  said.

  Finally you are able to locate your classroom and sit down. Within minutes you
  begin pulling up your sleeves and rubbing ice cubes across your forehead. With
  the vast temperature ranges in the classrooms it seems that your motto these
  days is “Biology hot, Spanish not.” In Biology you could use a cup of ice-cold
  lemonade and a couple grape popsicles but in Spanish you better bring a couple
  sweaters and a solar-powered heat generator next to you. There has to be
  something to make our days easier.

  “We should install mirrors on the corners of the Shire and behind Trinity for
  safety,” senior youth ministries major Kyle Cummins said.

  Given the amount of ailing children attempting to make it in time to the Health Center,
  it may be a good idea.

  Small improvements such as these could save us a minute here or a minute there.
  I could use a handful of fries without the ketchup disasters and I definitely
  would not mind riding a zip line to West. So APU, how about making my life
  easier?

   

   
  

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  LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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  Dear Editor,

  Perhaps it was meant to be funny, perhaps a little bit of exaggeration was used
  to make the point, but the point made in last week’s “If Only Life Was Easier”
  was perhaps the most self-centered and warped I have ever heard made in the
  Clause. It was outright complaining, and the humor did not, by any means, make
  it less inappropriate.

  Especially in the midst of Economic Justice Week when we learned in the
  “Inequality in Education” forum on Monday night about inner-city classrooms
  that don’t even have enough chairs for students to sit in, when we learned at
  the ELI Walk-a-Thon about the children that walk for two hours one way to get
  to the school that ELI built in Africa, when we learned at the “Black Gold”
  screening about the man in Ethiopia who would sell the shirt off of his back if
  it would help to build a schoolhouse for his children to be educated in –
  especially in the midst of all this truth about the general state of education
  in this world, I am absolutely shocked that we have allowed ourselves to
  complain about the facilities we have and to whine for better. To do so is to
  mock God’s gifts to us and to prove ourselves the most ignorantly
  self-centered, self-indulgent people on the planet.

  I read this article and thought of the children I met in Ecuador this summer
  who learn in one-room schoolhouses that are roofed with corrugated iron, furnished
  with splintery wooden desks (and too few of those), and baked in the nearly
  unbearably humid Amazonian sun. And I thought of the children in the rural town
  of Carrerras, Ecuador who walk a fair distance
  three times a week in wind that chaps their cheeks just to receive a lunch of
  white rice and beets at the Christian school. I thought of the billions who
  desperately need food and health care and who desire education of any kind, and
  thought what a sin it is that we cannot be content to have a cafeteria, a
  health center, and classrooms at all – let alone a cafeteria with choices and
  so many classrooms that we get lost finding them.

  We have lost perspective. We have lost the ability to look beyond ourselves and
  be thankful. It is not wrong to receive the blessings we have been given, but
  it is wrong to suggest that we have not been given enough. It is not even wrong
  to bring up preferences and safety issues to the administration, but it is
  entirely wrong to incite fellow students to complain. A joke can make
  selfishness seem ok.

  So take a sweater to your cold classroom and be thankful that you have air
  conditioning. Walk the half-mile to West Campus and be thankful that you don’t
  have to walk two hours for an education. And if you get ketchup on your new
  shirt, be thankful that you have forty others. Be thankful.

  Let’s open our eyes and stop being frivolous and self-centered. If you don’t
  think your life is easy enough, the fault lies in your perspective, not in a
  lack of blessing.

  Sincerely,
  Amy S*******
  Senior, English major

   

  • 4:04 pm
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