Opinion

So, I shaved my legs the other day. If you are a normal girl, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary.

Soon we will all take on our spring break characters. Some will travel; others will doze off to a world of sleep. Just as some of us will be wrapping up our third R.E.M. cycle, somewhere along the fringes of the UC Davis quad will emerge a group of people, almost camouflaged, swaying in stroke with the leaves.

History reveals that there has always been a stigma attached to alternative sexualities. Our current fight for marriage equality is a far cry from the days when homosexuality was classified as a psychological disorder in the 1973 edition of DSM-IV, or from when police raided gay bars looking to arrest anyone engaging in homosexual conduct.

Life is increasingly digital. We spend a lot of time living online, be that through e-mail, social networking sites, research or web browsing. Even when our experiences take hold in the physical world, they are beholden to status updates, photo albums, tweets, e-mails and procrasti-reading (e.g. when you hear an artist on the radio and then spend half an hour on Wikipedia reading their life story in lieu of writing your term paper). One might conclude that our entire lives both take place and are actively archived online.

I was getting worried for a bit there.

Californians Aware, a nonprofit open-government advocacy group, recently gave UC Davis a failing grade for inadequately responding to public records requests.

I am just as mad as any other student about the budget cuts and tuition hikes that are happening on our campus and the rest of the University of California. Yes, it makes me steam to hear about the inflated salaries of top administrators! Yes, it pisses me off that there is no transparency between students and the higher rungs of the university ladder! But in these moments of anger and frustration, I feel we are losing sight of what is the bigger issue at hand.

For the most part, college students live their lives day to day, from class to class. Daytime agendas rarely cause fashion stress and life can be lived out in jeans and a hoodie, if desired.

Other than using “hella” and referencing the freeways incorrectly by forgetting to use an article, I’ve noticed another distinction that fuels the NorCal vs. SoCal debate: swearing. I might be living in a skewed sample since Davis seems to be the friendliest city in the world, but the NorCal crowd just doesn’t use profanity as much as SoCal residents do. All the sunshine and nice beaches must make people dirty-mouthed sailors.

In the wake of labor unrest in states throughout the mideast and the midwest, I was particularly shaken by Rob Olson’s Feb. 24 column titled “Useless Unions,” which lambasted public service unions, blamed state workers for budget shortfalls and concluded by outrageously calling for the legal abolishment of public sector unions.

In the past few weeks, there has been some terrific debating regarding animal consumption and its effects (or supposed lack of effects) on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If anything, it has been great to see this issue brought to the forefront, as it encourages people to think more critically about such a complicated issue.

Last Thursday’s ASUCD senate meeting officially marked a new beginning.