We Like Grass

By Tamika Whitenack Ohhhh boyyy has life been busy here! I won't be writing too much in this blog post, but I wanted to share an article that I recently wrote for our school newspaper. It is about baking, and family, and you can find it here: http://miscellanynews.org/2019/02/20/features/celebratory-baking-yields-tangible-tasty-reminder-of-home/ In other newspaper news, the girl I help babysit and I ended up in the local paper! Hehe. Try to find me here: https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/life/2019/01/31/brush-up-skills-take-class-hudson-valley-libraries/2688050002/ In other, totally unexpected news, art modeling for figure drawing classes off campus has recently become a small part of my life, and has actually been a really profound experience for me! I want to write more in depth about this at some point, but the biggest impressions are that it has been a very empowering experience that is very healthy for my relationship with my body, and it also helped get m...

By Tamika Whitenack Some snapshots from life back at Vassar: the new sensation of labored breathing that only comes from a brave long run in 4˚ weather a packed Asian Student's Alliance meeting with 40 people making peanut noodles and veg-tofu stir fry in the adventurous place that is the Raymond kitchen a climbing wall at some remote camp in upstate NY a bearded professor with a fiddle. Some college students in fun dresses. Some college students in jeans. A contra dance! copious amounts of tea, every day all day 200 pages of reading Silent Spring 40 pages of reading about the Scottish kilt 100 pages of reading about white bread, and it's role in Cold War politics, American consumerism, counterculture and feminism, and oh so much more 100 pages of reading how old white men conceptualized the American wilderness more reading some reading on the treadmill some Spanish poems some maps some reading about genetic climate systems the polar vortex ...

Hello friends! I’m officially back at school, but before we get into that I did so many fun school things before classes even started that I need to share! So Wind Ensemble takes a trip every year, and this year we got extra funding from the music department so we got to go Barcelona!!! So I flew back to Tufts a week early and went to the airport with my whole WE gang Tuesday night. Everyone was so excited! We could not believe we were about to be in Spain! Then after a few hours of waiting at the airport we learned that the airline could only send six of us to Spain. We were not about to be in Spain...Because one guy was flying on a different flight and was already in the air, we decided that we couldn’t just leave him to fend for himself in Spain for a week so we sent the six people with tickets to Barcelona while the rest of us rode the subway back to Tufts. After a long night of deliberating what to do and arguing with the airline, we were given free tickets on the airline’s ne...

By Tamika Whitenack HELLO! it has been so long, as in over a month! Wow. I apologize for the hiatus, remember those technological issues I mentioned? Well, that all culminated in a stressful computer mess in which my laptop became a piece of random metal and I learned how to survive on a college campus without a personal computer (a very humbling and growth-filled experience). During this period, I was not in the mind to be doing anything on the computer apart from school related stuff, and once I received my new computer (so grateful to have the privilege to be able to get a new computer! and treating it like a baby), it was the busy busy season of finals and stuff and then well somehow we got to this december 16 and here I am in terminal 5 of the JFK airport. Its funny because this is so parallel to last year, when I was also flying home on Dec 16, and writing my last blog post of the semester in the airport. I want to go read that one actually, but even wit...