Opinion

I love café hopping. During breaks back home in Berkeley, I make it a point to hit up all my favorite cafes on College Ave; Café Bittersweet, The Beanery and Espresso Roma are all either quaint, independent coffee shops or local chains.

Peer pressure is a bitch. Here I was, starting my column for this week, about to delve into some deep, controversial discussion on Libya (I had a Wikipedia page pulled up and everything) when I realized that – whoops, nobody told me! – we were supposed to be discussing technology last week. I don’t know if you noticed, but the words Facebook, blog, and OkCupid were thrown around quite a bit in The Aggie’s columns. Since I spend as much time in cyberspace as the next over-stimulated college student, I decided, hey, what the hell, Gaddafi is too hard to spell anyway.

If L.A. and S.F. are the main battlegrounds for bike/car wars, Davis is where bicycles politely agree to disagree but never get in a fight. Davis is a place that’s too kind to cyclists to encourage aggressive events such as bike polo, underground racing, or critical masses. The main activities of leisure in Davis are drinking way too much, peeing on cars and stealing bikes (I know, I live downtown and put up with a billion of you bros this weekend. My housemate was watching a crew of boys walk away from downtown and look at our bike rack and say, “man, we would go a lot faster if we had some of those”. Thankfully she was there to stop them before they got too creative, but the fact remains that young irresponsible males need a channel for this sort of negative energy).

The University of California Student Association (UCSA) wants UC Davis.

“All we want is to talk. All we want is dialogue.”

The excitement is building as the Davis community prepares for what is both the biggest celebration of the year and one of UC Davis’ most cherished traditions: Picnic Day.

I remember sitting in Dr. Frank Hirtz’s Community Development class when he said something to the effect of “the solutions to problems are often dictated by people’s perceptions.” While I no longer study community and regional development, this is something that has resonated with me during my tenure as chair of Picnic Day.

Cry a river, and someone will probably build a bridge for you. You cry. I cry. Everybody cries.

There are few things that are as eye-opening as exposing oneself to another culture. And no, I’m not talking about putting Nutella on your toast.

Last year, Picnic Day resulted in 516 calls to the police and 33 separate arrests, more than double the previous year.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that this year’s Picnic Day is a particularly important one. What happens on Saturday will determine the fate of the campus’ oldest and most beloved tradition — a hundred-year tradition that has survived the likes of hoof and mouth disease and a world war only to meet its potential end now and in this way.

Choose a word to describe yourself. Now, how accurately does that word actually define you?