How to Fly Your Elephant into the New Year
By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer
One of the greatest days of my life came when I was quite young, sitting in science class. I was always a good student, but had trouble when assignments grew into multi-day or multi-week endeavors. The stress of a science fair project felt like an elephant sitting on my chest: daunting and impossible to know where to start. The Dumbos of my youth were gone, and this new pachyderm packed quite a punch.
As a child you assume that the world is either entirely orderly or pure chaos; growing older and understanding that neither is particularly true can be a demoralizing and paralyzing recognition of the challenging mountain each of us must climb. But the day I first learned about the relationship between potential and kinetic energy, in the form of Newton's First Law of Motion, I saw the peaks before me shift into ramps so that I may fly, if I flapped my wings consistently (I also had big ears, which helped).
Newton’s First Law of Motion describes ‘inertia’, the natural law that states an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest, also known as ‘momentum.’ The morning I learned that such a succinct force governed the universe, and therefore my little life as well, was the day I learned how to transform my mountains into ramps: pebble by pebble, and feeding the elephant only one peanut at a time.
One of the most annoying tidbits passed around every Christmastime is the that gym memberships increase by about twelve percent each January, as the population attempts their “New Year’s Resolutions,” with these figures dropping off only a month or two later. I was a pedantic child, who grew up to be a very pedantic man, so at literally no point have I felt anything other than dumbfounded shock that people assign self-improvement to something so arbitrary as the calendar, probably lecturing some adults at a Christmas party, “Santa Claus is definitely real, the Easter Bunny is my best friend, and the TV says that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction…but I wasn’t born yesterday: you dorks are lazy.”
Holidays in the Time of COVID
By: Morgan Jacobus, Editor in Chief
COVID has made so many dramatic changes to so many different aspects of our lives, but something that affected me more than I thought it would was the effect of COVID on the holidays.
For me and my family, we normally have a simple holiday, just the three of us. We never threw any parties, or hosted any get-togethers, we just spent time together; me, my mama, and my dad. Since we usually have a rather isolated holiday already, I didn’t think I would feel that affected come time for the holidays. However, there were subtle things that I missed that made a big difference.
Going Home for the Holidays
By: Morgan Jacobus, Editor in Chief and Sarah Gomez, Staff Writer
For many students, this may be the first time they are preparing to go home for winter break, while for others it is a different experience because of the nature of this particular break. This year, rather than a Thanksgiving Break then a Winter Break, students are going to be home from November 20th through at least the 16th of January; a break of over 50 days. Additionally, there is the added element of finals taking place remotely when students are at home, so on top of preparing for being home, students also have to prepare for their finals. It can be a daunting task to figure out what one should pack and how they should prepare, so we have offered a number of tips along with important information to keep in mind.
The Diminishing Value of Your Vote
By: Jesse Stuart, Staff Writer
Just before his death, Osman Hamdi Bey painted a portrait of an old man attempting to train tortoises and succeeded in indirectly depicting the inherent deficiencies of a dying government. Bey was the preeminent artist during the Tanzimat, a time when the Ottoman Empire was struggling to adopt the technological innovations of Europe while preserving their sense of identity and culture. In his 1906 painting, The Tortoise Trainer, Bey displays the simple scene of an elder (who bears a resemblance to the painter himself) using a flute and vegetables to train the tortoises at his feet.
The image is a satirical one; regardless of who the man and the reptiles are meant to represent, he is an antiquated figure in antiquated garb and using antiquated techniques to coach creatures for a pointless purpose (tortoises were once used as living decorations but certainly no longer by 1906), rendering this entire moment an anachronism: there is no reform or action that the Ottoman government can take to salvage itself, as the political structures by which it operates are the very nooses slowly tightening around its neck.
You can look at The Tortoise Trainer and think of the Ottoman Empire, ‘destined’ to fall and fracture after World War One, but I see the United States in every brushstroke, a comparison quite evident not just by the candidates of the 2020 election but attitude of its voters.
