We Like Grass

By Cameron Rusin Hi friends! It’s Friday night, so something is probably going on, but it’s officially finals period and I’ve managed to get the flu during my last week on campus so I’m having a peaceful night kind of studying, but also just thinking, on the library roof. It’s insane how beautiful it is up here! I watched the sunset then when it got dark the landscape lights turned on, I’m surrounded by yellow tulips that decided it was time to bloom this week, and the ballroom team is practicing their swing dancing up here (although their music taste of country music is a little questionable). The view from my spot. It's hard to capture the serenity but imagine mood lighting and tulips dancing in the wind I guess I’ll start the blog with the bad news, but maybe not actually bad news. I’m officially getting my first B ever! Exciting? I don’t know, but I have been thinking about it a lot more than I should. I came to college knowing it would be hard. I knew that no one gr...

By Tamika Whitenack Happy May! Happy birthday month to so many people that I love! Happy Spring! After weeks of gray skies and cold weather, it's finally sunny and warm! The campus is transforming and I love it! I am in a fantastic mood, I can best describe it as feeling like I am filled with a ray of sunshine that wants to burst out of me and shower the world with flower petals. The main point of this post is to just share a bunch of photos of spring/food that I've been making. There's a correlation between weather/flowers, my mood, and the frequency at which I make foodstuffs. Hehehehe also sorry about all the "Fly Away Home" references I also want to mention an awesome event-a cooking class that I went to last Thursday. It was great! I blogged about it here: http://pages.vassar.edu/hvagriculture/ blossoming stairs/"light way to light" jam tart jam tartlets out of the pan pink white herb challah chocolate cinna...

By Tamika Whitenack I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which I can live better and be more conscious of my presence and reduce my consumption and environmental impact....it's a little overwhelming, and sometimes I feel like I really shouldn't be doing anything other than sitting outside wearing clothes made from the local leaves on the ground or something. In an effort to address this craziness, I've decided it would be interesting to take stock of one of my typicalish days and sort of assess what little things I feel like I can realistically do. A typical day in the life of Tamika: Wake-up in my bed and my pajamas: be mindful of what bedding/clothing I buy-what is it made of, who made it, how far did it travel? and how often I wash it Brush my teeth: what goes into my toothpaste? can i buy a better version or make my own in a better way? can i be conscious of how much water i really need to use to brush my teeth? Go to the bathroom: should i flush? af...

Hi friends! Somehow I've already had quite the week, and it's only Tuesday night. College has changed me in many ways, but one of the more surprising ones was my music taste, and that's what I spontaneously want to talk about tonight. As y'all might know, in high school I was a pretentious butt about music. There was good music and there was bad music, and which side of that line you fell on said something about your character. However since coming to college I've found myself listening to, and enjoying, much more of that "bad" music than I used to. There are a couple of concrete reasons for this, like never getting speaker control during my 2 months on the spin bike and the general music taste of the team/parties, but also some less concrete reasons, like how I think I'm less sad than I was in high school so have less of a need for my weird-indie-sad music. Don't get me wrong, I still have my ~quirky~ music taste, but I often find myself wanti...

By Tamika Whitenack There are two weeks and two days of classes left, which feels very much like we are approaching the end of the year. Yikes! In a month, I will be heading home. What has happened this week? On Wednesday we had our end-of-year awards event for the ALANA Center, which was a fun event to honor students and eat lots of good food :) Later that evening, there was a lecture/talk by Junot Diaz on campus. This was a very good event. I hadn't read that much of his work before except a bit for my freshman writing seminar, but he did a few short story readings and then a lot of questions. The Q&A session was cool because he very intentionally focused on women of color and was super charismatic in his answers, he really wasn't afraid to be honest or to call out Vassar and other institutions about issues. On Friday we had another farm trip, this one to Rise and Root farm. This farm is owned by four women and seemed to be a bit of a smaller operation than a lot of...

Hi friends! It’s been a long while since I posted anything… It was the kind of thing where at first I was like “I just missed a week, I’ll get back on track next weekend!” and then all of a sudden a month and a half had passed… My bad. Needless to say, school got a little hard… So now I have way too much to talk about! So here are little summaries of a lot of things! New Orleans I went to New Orleans over Spring Break with the Wind Ensemble! This was super fun! About 35 of us went, along with our conductor and a person from the music staff, and all of the students stayed in a hostel which was exciting. There were ten of us to a bedroom, giant communal bathrooms, and a large communal kitchen and living room area with couches, guitars (?), and a TV. I actually really liked the hostel living situation. We had two performances, but the trip was mostly free time in the city, which was so different than EC band trips. New Orleans was a fun city, but not really for ...