Back to School :)

By Tamika Whitenack

Three weeks into the semester, and I still haven’t blogged! What a hiatus. The explanation is that I have been caught up in a whirlwind of activities and busy weekends, but I will do my best to include everything in this blog post. Although it took me a couple weeks to adjust back to the Vassar pace of life and mindset for doing schoolwork, I’m quite pleased to be back at school and enjoying everything now. I spent Thursday afternoon watching my Spanish telenovela Velvet and baking for the Climate Strike on Friday, and I was just so happy! I also got a lot of compliments on my outfit that day, which was a good confidence booster hehe.

Where to start? I suppose the main reason I am at Vassar is for school, so I’ll share about classes. I have 4 this semester and really enjoy all of them. My Intro to Special Education class is allowing me to engage more with disability studies work, which is something I haven’t thought about too much but am growing increasingly aware of and hoping to learn more about because ableist oppression is very real! And offers really interesting things to think about in terms of the value of work and notions of equality. This class is sort of in conversation with my other education class, Rethinking Gender. This class is good for making me think about cisgender privilege, but we’ve also been doing some settler colonialism readings to start off and talking about decolonization, both used as a general social justice call and also in the specific settler colonial context of repatriation of indigenous land and life (tuck and yang). So much intellectual stimulation! So many good class discussions! But it gets better because that class is very much in conversation with my Queer of Color Critique class, which has been full of radical ideas and really interesting insights from our professor. I’m super pleased that these 3 classes kind of play off each other, and I also find that all the professors do a good job of structuring class and guiding discussion. Also, the assignments for these classes are all somewhat creative and open to interpretation, which I am always a fan of! I’m working on an autobiography for Rethinking Gender, a research-informed story for Special Ed, and a free-from book response for QoC.

So what’s the 4^th class? Biology! A bit different from the other 3, this is my science for the semester. The class is plant diversity and function, and we are focusing specifically on trees right now. The lab periods consist of going outside to take really leisurely hikes in which we learn how to identify trees! It’s a lot of fun and I’m trying to put my new attunement to bark color and leaf shape into practice as I walk around campus and run on the farm. Come visit and I’ll attempt to offer a tree tour J

Besides all this fun with formal class, I’m also involved in a student-run Asian American Studies class. Our student-activist group organized this course since we don’t have any formal AAS courses offered this semester, and it’s been going well so far! I taught class on Friday on the topic of environmental activisim and Asian American studies. It’s been a good opportunity to learn new AAS content, but also a great experiment with pedagogy and classroom dynamics…I’m excited to see how the class evolves over the course of the semester.

Life is also busy with Vassar Food Community, the student organization that I’m part of. This semester, we are getting a CSA share from Poughkeepsie Farm Project, which means that each Saturday we get to go over there and pick out some beautiful veggies! We’ve also been trying to volunteer, and having this farm time in my life has been lovely. Last week we had our first meeting and cooked a nice dinner with the produce from the farm (see the last pics on this post). We have a lot of other projects in mind for this semester too, and I’m feeling really good about it all.

On the subject of food, I’ve also been working on my goal of cooking more and avoiding the dining hall this semester. It’s going pretty well, in part because I have lots of friends with on-campus apartments (read: kitchens). I can get a lot of veggies from the dining hall, as well as assorted things from the woman I babysit for. I also have been collecting a lot of leftovers from various campus events, because I now live in Main building and people bring the leftover trays of food from their events there. I try to always carry a Tupperware with me so I can snag some curry and rice or vegetables if I’m passing by!

My living situation for this semester is a suite, which is 3 separate rooms off a shared common space. The common space has couches and we have 2 minifridges and a microwave, but we still live in a big dorm and have bathrooms shared with everyone else on our hallway. I’m enjoying social living and getting to know my suitemates, as well as our slow process of interior decorating. The only downside is that my room doesn’t have natural light, but I think I’m getting more used to waking up in the dark and am always spending the rest of my day outside or near windows.

One of my other goals for this semester is to get more involved with environmental activism, and I spent the first weekend attending a Sunrise Summit in Providence, RI. The Sunrise Movement is a global movement of young people who want to address climate action and are rallying around the Green New Deal as a way to create jobs and stop climate change. It was a good experience and I’m excited about their goals and philosophy, but also still wary because I think I’m a little disillusioned with politics and also questioning the emphasis on jobs. I also think climate justice and inclusion and acknowledgment of people most affected is really important and Sunrise is def trying to address this but could maybe be doing better? Basically, I’m excited about the revolutionary possibility of the movement but also constantly thinking critically and also a bit of a baby about committing myself to wholeheartedly stand behind a cause because I am afraid of being wrong. I think that is my thoughts. Anyway, after the summit I’ve been a bit more involved with student groups on campus and attended the climate strike on Friday. We’ll see how this develops throughout the semester.

So none of my classes this semester explicitly relates to food but I did sit in on a guest speaker in a class that my advisor is teaching and he was talking about queer farming and queer theory and farming and agroecology and also agroecology in argentina and basically I found it all fascinating and thought I should mention it.

Busy weekends! Last weekend I was at Vassar but ran a half-marathon on Sunday. It was on the rail trail, which is our regular stomping grounds and very flat. The race went well but wasn’t my best, I don’t think I was quite in the race mindset (possibly because I run on the trail all the time? I’m not sure). This weekend I took a little trip down to visit Mariko in Brooklyn! It was quite pleasant and relaxed, we mostly just hung out in her apartment and studied together because we are both nerds. But that is the beauty of family time, is that simple coexistence in a space can be super special and I didn’t feel like we needed to go adventuring in order to make it a worthwhile visit.

Some other not super noteworthy things but I should mention anyway because they occur in my life. I still am working at the ALANA Center, of course I am still running, I’ve just gotten back into a schedule of pilates and yoga and swimming as well, I’m still babysitting off-campus, and I’m still trying to play flute and piano although have been neglecting it more than I should.

I have probably forgotten something because 3 weeks is a lot to write about! But hopefully you feel more caught up on my life now and here are some fun pictures yayayay