Opinion

Dear Editor, I know it's a little late to be writing about a holiday that happened just about two weeks ago, but after reading an Atheist's perspective on Christian celebrations, I thought it would be an interesting idea to present a Muslim American's perspective on yearly Christian holidays.

I love you. Yes, you - I love you. For many reasons, I fall more in love with this job every week. But I love it most when you - my precious readers - send me e-mails. Minus the occasional hate mail, every e-mail tugs at my heartstrings and makes me feel great knowing that you're all enjoying and supporting what I have to say.

Sometimes we ask for really dumb things. A week-and-a-half ago, the beginning of baseball season was right around the corner - and so was the real beginning of the term. An avalanche of assignments, readings, band gigs and a million other obligations were thundering down Mount Quarter System. But all I wanted was to watch baseball.

There it was. A perfect circle smack on the center of my right cheek. A lump of glowing redness popping out of an otherwise smooth (and contrastingly pale) surface. My first-ever real (aka noticeable) pimple had sprouted. I woke up, stared at the bathroom mirror and my eyes popped out as far as they would ever go. If only the darn pimple could pop along with them. An episode of "Animaniacs" from the days when after-school cartoons still played on Kids' WB! immediately came to mind. In the episode, a teenage girl (aka "Katie Ka-Boom") looks into the mirror only to notice a swollen pimple plopped on her face. This then causes her to turn into a raging, green beast that tramples all over town.

The problem with leaving religion behind is that your family usually doesn't do it with you. This Easter, as with every Easter, I went home in honor of a resurrection I don't believe in. Although I'm an atheist, my mom still made me a basket lined with candy and filled with things like face-wash and socks, my relatives still greeted me with variations of "He is risen!" and there was still an Easter egg hunt for people under four feet tall.

Students convicted of drug offenses were again left behind last month when Congress passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act.

Editor's note: The California Aggie has received an overwhelming number of letters urging the administration not to remove any of its 27 Intercollegiate Athletics teams. The following writings express the sentiments voiced in the majority of those submissions.

Well, it was rainy as shit for a lot of last week, right after I wrote a column about how glorious the spring weather in Davis is. And, as you're reading this, it's probably really nice out. Or it's not. I wrote this a few days ago. As Bob Dylan said, "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

In a perfect world, everyone would wake up safe every morning in their own bed, with their keys, wallet, cell phone and dignity still intact. But this is Davis. That doesn't always happen. In Chico, it probably never happens, but it's best not to compare ourselves to a place where keg stands in your front yard at 11 a.m. on any given Sunday won't elicit so much as a second glance.

Everyone is going green. We're buying hybrid cars and using canvas grocery bags to decrease our carbon footprint. We're eating more locally grown food and installing energy efficient light bulbs. Go us! While many of us have changed the way we go about our daily lives, I bet you didn't know you could green-ify your sex life, too. Yes, that's right people. You can go green between the sheets.

So I was standing in line at SaveMart, buying my usual DiGiorno pizza, when I saw a Cosmopolitan magazine. Of course, there was some half-naked woman on the cover looking at me like I was a DiGiorno pizza. What made it even more uncomfortable was the fact it was Lady Gaga. (I think I'm the only person on the face of the Earth that hasn't gone gaga over Gaga. Her outfits are stupid and her songs bug me. What the hell is a disco stick? Why don't you just turn off your phone when you're at a club? What if I just dance and things aren't okay?)

Last week, the UC Commission on the Future came up with several ideas to reduce the impact of the budget deficit. One scheme expanding access to courses is online instruction through a pilot program that tests its effects.

I'm sure that by now many of you have read or heard something about the gravity of the financial problems at UC Davis and the potential impact on the Intercollegiate Athletics program. In recent weeks, hundreds of students, staff, faculty, alumni and friends of the university have contacted me to express their heartfelt concern for particular sports programs or for the future of Intercollegiate Athletics overall. I've also had numerous meetings with internal constituent groups. I appreciate your interest and your concern, and I want everyone in the UC Davis community to understand that I feel and hear your worry and distress.

With the exception of cleaning up after myself, I don't do anything half-assed. I take normal shit - shit most people would consider to be blah and mundane - and go way over the top.

My brother's friend Peter died a few months ago in a head-on collision on a two-lane highway near the bombsite he worked at in the Mojave Desert. I got the phone call during the third act of the Third Eye festival, and left in the middle of the performance to pick it up. My brother said he was going to the funeral that coming Sunday.