This past Sunday while many people drove home to their families to celebrate Easter, others stayed in Davis and used the quieter atmosphere as an excuse to catch up on neglected homework. And then there were a few who, like me, celebrated an Easter of the Greek sort.

To me, Greek Easter is nearly indistinguishable from American Easter except for a few things. One, it goes by the Julian (rather than Gregorian) calendar, and must always fall after the Jewish holiday of Passover. It’s only a coincidence this year that Greek Easter and American Easter happen to overlap. And two, I bet you “Americans” don’t have egg-cracking contests.

The ritual consists of first tie-dying a hard-boiled egg for each guest. The eggs then sit in a large glass bowl throughout the span of Easter dinner, waiting to be unleashed and work their fighting magic after the sun sets and the bellies digest. Some Greeks choose to wait until after dessert to crack eggs with one another, while others dive right in after dinner. The aim is pretty basic: one-on-one round-robin tournament until the best egg wins, emerging from the competition unscathed. This year, my teal egg was champion at the kids’ table, but was met with defeat at the adult’s table against my dad’s mighty red conqueror.

Another thing about Greek Easter is that we’re big meat eaters, so you’re more likely to encounter platters of lamb at a Greek Easter gathering than at an American one. We don’t roast it on a spit like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but you’ll see it making the rounds in long thick strips at both the kids’ and adult table.

Our obsession with meat often poses a challenge for my vegetarian sister, who still has to explain herself to baffled older Greek ladies every time she politely declines their offer of oozing red meat. This year she lucked out by discovering that my uncles had cooked stuffed zucchinis and feta cheese potato strips in addition to the lamb. My dad’s Greek salad is also a vegetarian staple at family gatherings, whether or not we’re hosting the event.

Though my family celebrates Greek Easter every year, I don’t identify primarily as Greek. Some people have a master identity or an aspect of self that largely overshadows their other components. I’ve always seen myself as more of a mutt when it comes not just to nationality, but to means of identification in other areas as well.

In a queer studies class I’m taking, we’ve spent time discussing intersectional theory of identities. The theory generally is applied to systems of oppression, emphasizing how inequality isn’t black or white. Many oppressed groups belong to various marginalized identities, as opposed to just one, and the interlocking of these identities only exacerbates the inequality.

But in a lighter, looser sense, intersectionality to me is just a way of describing more complex, less linear identities that can’t be easily summarized or referred to in shorthand. Holding various, perhaps even discordant, identities often allows for some mobility and selective identification. Without being tied down to one, we can conveniently identify with one when we’re practicing an act that is more tolerated by that aspect of identity.

For instance, in Greece they’re a bit less progressive than over here. I feel that if I lived there and identified as a prototypical Greek, I’d probably face some cognitive dissonance with being gay and Greek at the same time. For this reason, I don’t think of myself as a gay Greek; I identify as an LGBT individual whose dad was born in Cyprus.

I also like to account for the 25 percent of my blood that belongs to German ancestry and the 25 percent belonging to Czech. But the 50 percent of me that’s Greek always looks forward to occasions like Sunday.

Rather than being emblematic of my identity, I see the Easter ritual as just cool and kind of random. I’m by no means your prototypical Greek, but for many of us, the small fragments of identity we embody are only small pieces of our full persona. That being said, a lot of those pieces will be random and cool.

For instance, the fact that my family has paid-for lodging in two Greek countries is not a perk that everyone gets. I also never would have started collecting model donkeys if it wasn’t for souvenirs brought back from those countries that augmented my army of snouted friends.

The traces of Greek culture that constitute my life were largely unrealized when I was younger. Both my sister and I weren’t even aware that our dad had a Greek accent. Accustomed as we were to it, we just assumed it was the “standard” American way of speaking. And though I know most kids didn’t have their dads come in to teach Greek folk dancing and serve baklava to a classroom of culturally naïve second graders, I never thought much of it until I had the processing skills to reflect on the experience and say to myself, “Wow – this is actually kind of cool.”

I’ll be looking forward to the next Greek event come May 15 to17 at the Greek Festival in Oakland. Come join me for your own bite of lamb if you didn’t get to eat any on Easter!

ELENI STEPHANIDES can be reached at estephanides@ucdavis.edu.

One of my top three favorite holidays took place last Friday: happy belated Earth Day! (Although, let’s get real. Every day should be Earth Day.) Ideally, you celebrated by having a dance party with solar-generated light and buying only locally-grown, organic food that needs no packaging.

I celebrated by going to the English department’s screening of Waste Land, an Oscar-nominated documentary that came out in 2010. The film follows Vik Muniz, an avant-garde artist known for using unusual objects (go Google his Double Mona Lisa after Warhol, which uses peanut butter and jelly to recreate a Warhol screen print). Feeling a little too snug in his rich and famous New York City lifestyle, Muniz decides to return to his home country of Brazil to take on his next artistic endeavor.

Muniz travels to the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to document the people of Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill. The catadores, workers who pick recyclable materials out of the mountains of garbage in order to make money, instantly capture his attention. The film quickly points out that people who work with garbage are still people. They are full of life and emit an unexpected vibrancy.

For the next two years, Muniz and a few select catadores work to create giant trash portraits of these colorful people. Using materials collected from the landfill like old film, dirt, flip flops, bottle caps, tires and other seemingly worthless items, the first installment of Pictures of Garbage sells at auction in London for over $50,000. The film is a touching story of how we can use art for social change.

Another great benefit of Waste Land is that it makes the audience think about one question throughout the film: how do we deal with living in a world full of garbage? As one of the catadores brings up in her interview, it’s easy for us to sit on our couch, consume as much as we want and then throw our trash into the street, where we will probably never see it again. We drink our soda, throw away the can and think nothing else of it. It’s out of sight, out of mind.

Reflecting on how much trash we produce in just a day can be a bit depressing. Our food comes in packaging. We read this newspaper and toss it at the end of the day. Those jeans you split a hole in from your crazy dance moves are worthless and in the trash. How much does our culture waste in just one day?

Garbage is an unavoidable consequence of our 21st century consumerism. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2009, the average American produced 4.3 pounds of waste per day. Where does that waste go? Only 33.8 percent of American waste is recovered and recycled or composted; the rest is either burned or put in a landfill.

With the recent push towards green advertising in the past few years, we have probably all heard about the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle. We all probably own at least one reusable bag. We all see the three bins around campus: compost, recycle, landfill.

Yet, just because we see these things around us, do we ever stop and think about them? When was the last time you hesitated before throwing away that trash into the landfill bin or asking for a plastic bag at Safeway?

While waste production is something we can’t completely stop from happening, it is something we can control. Reduce your consumption. Opt for a banana (complete with biodegradable packaging) instead of that candy bar covered in aluminum foil. Refuse to purchase the memory card that comes in the weird plastic that’s impossible to open and impossible to recycle.

Upcycling (giving value to waste by repurposing it) is another way to cut down on garbage. In the film, a young boy ties a string to a plastic shopping bag and uses it as a kite. Last week, I read an article about the “Binary Chair,” which is a chair made completely from computer waste like motherboards and Ethernet cables. We can give worthless trash a purpose by reusing our waste.

If you can’t reduce and you can’t reuse, then recycle. Even recycling just one piece of old notebook paper can help. As Valter, a wise, old catador of Jardim Gramacho, said in his interview, “People sometimes say ‘But one single can?’ One single can is of great importance. Because 99 is not 100, and that single one will make the difference.”

CORRIE JACOBS wants to know what you’re gonna do with all that junk inside your trunk. You better be upcycling it into something cool. (And if it’s art, you better submit it to Nameless Magazine!) Share your ideas at cljacobs@ucdavis.edu.

At the end of last year, a fierce debate sprang up in Congress over taxes.

Most legislators agreed that they wanted to extend tax cuts for the middle class that were set to expire, but the tax cuts for “the rich” became a source of heated contention. As usual, the Democrats wanted to increase their taxes to 39.6 percent, while Republicans wanted to keep them at the lower levels of 35 percent.

In the end, the compromise that was reached encompassed multiple issues and left people on all sides only arguing even more – this time, about who won or not. But with regard to the tax cuts for the rich, the Republicans more or less “won” since the cuts were extended another two years.

I admit, loving the rich might seem a curious position for me to take. In the face of huge deficits for federal, state and local governments across America, a weak economy and a tough job market, who would have the audacity to refuse for the rich to shoulder more of the burden?

They certainly can afford to. The tax cuts in question were for those making more than $250,000 annually, a rather large sum to me that I will assuredly never reach – not as a teacher anyways. And yet I was relieved to see the tax cut extensions continued for everyone. Why?

For one, the rich pay an exorbitant percentage of our federal income taxes already. The top 1 percent of earners pays 38 percent of what the feds take in, while the top 10 percent pay a whopping 70 percent. Similar numbers hold up for the state budgets, one reason why California needs to ensure that we are not chasing the rich out of our state altogether.

So the rich already pay quite a bit in taxes – far, far more than their proportion of the population. They pay for our schools, our roads, our police and firefighters, and much more. Most of the money the government spends comes from the rich but benefits the rest of us.

In other words, we already enjoy the perks of a government financed primarily by our top earners. That’s reason No. 1 for why I love the rich.

Reason No. 2 isn’t about taxes but instead about the economy as a whole. Arguments from the Democrats against tax cuts for high-earners generally revolve around the little guy – gardeners, educators, factory workers, food service workers, pool boys, etc. The tax cuts must be stopped, they allege, in order to help the masses.

What they fail to realize is that the rich are already helping these folks out, entirely independent of the forced redistribution of wealth by higher progressive taxes.

 Every one of the workers I listed above already benefits from the prosperous among us. The gardener tends the estate in the morning while the tutor educates the child after school. The caterer sets up the food at the birthday party, the factory worker builds the three cars in the driveway and the pool boy does whatever pool boys do.

This is the much-maligned “trickle-down” argument, that the rich spend all kinds of money in our society and their wealth “trickles” down without the heavy hand of Uncle Sam.

 It has long been fashionable to say that the theory of trickle-down economics is discredited. It is evidently not fashionable to prove it, because all I see are vague references from righteous protesters and editorial boards across the country.

Independent of forcing them to pay higher taxes, I love the rich because they create a tremendous number of jobs for all of us. By simple math, by simple definition, they have the money to do so.

Finally, even when the CEOs and celebrities “keep” their money, in banks or in stocks, we are all still immensely better off. When they invest in a business or a technology, or when they deposit their money in a bank to be loaned out for cars and homes, their money is hard at work in the economy and increasing prosperity for us all. That’s reason No. 3.

In contrast, high taxes simply bring a middleman into the equation. Then the incredible wealth of America’s rich has to go through the government, to be inefficiently and unwisely distributed by whole offices and infrastructures that add nothing to our cumulative wealth. If we avoid taxing the rich too much, we will be better off as a result.

I don’t believe in taxing our way to prosperity, not because I want to help the rich, but because I want to help everyone else.

Make ROB OLSON rich with knowledge by e-mailing him at rwolson@ucdavis.edu.

Geoffrey Wildanger was 100 percent right in his assertion that the job of an ambassador is to represent the views of their government and improve their country’s relations. So I can see why he did not want to engage with Akiva Tor about Israel.  

With that said, I have now written two pieces in the Aggie, calling for and encouraging dialogue between students, all of which have fallen on deaf ears. Not one single response asking to talk about a peaceful future, and for that, I ask you, Mr. Wildanger, and the UCD student body, why? Are you not interested in living in peace? Not interested in a two-state agreement? Because more than anything else, I would like to see my friends and family not have to serve in an army (all ethical/political judgments aside – all countries maintain a defensive force of sorts) and engage in conflicts. I’d love to be able to know 100 percent that they will return from their army service and not be put in danger. I would love to be able to spend time in Israel and not worry about safety. I would love for our peoples to live in peace, for me to be able to see the beauties of the West Bank and for Palestinians to travel freely without checkpoints or fences. 

This cannot happen without peace. Come, let’s talk, and start a true dialogue and one day: “We will learn to live together, between olive groves. Children will live without fear, without borders, and without bomb shelters. On the graves the grass of peace and love will blossom,” Yehonatan Geffen said. 

I recognize that my request is not an easy one. Both sides are at fault, and both sides will continue to remain in a stalemate until people are willing to focus on what unites us as people rather than what divides us.  

Let’s get together and talk, whether its about baseball, food or TV – it’s the first step. One day, once we know each other, it will be a whole lot easier to start talking about the harder stuff, the future and how to put an end to a conflict I fear might never end. Please, let us engage in a dialogue.  Let’s push the two peoples forward, and hopefully, towards peace.

I’ll be standing at the Flagpole at the MU on Friday at noon. Come meet me there. 

ARI POLSKY is a senior studio major.

California voters may soon be faced with the option to increase the tax on cigarettes from 87 cents a pack to $1.87.

Though it is unclear when California voters will have the chance to increase taxes on tobacco products, efforts to do so should be supported and encouraged. Taxes are a good motivator to end bad habits.

This extra dollar would fund research on cancer and tobacco-related illnesses, tobacco-prevention and anti-tobacco legislation, among other things.

Though the Tea Party and other anti-tax Californians take issue with larger fees, the loudest opposition has come from tobacco companies and their affiliates, who have successfully prevented tax increases since 1999.

It’s about time that we stop letting Big Tobacco kill legislation and their customers.

It is predicted that increasing the tax will decrease tax revenue, as tobacco sales will decline. Essentially, less smoking means less money to fund anti-smoking campaigns.

But is this really an issue? No programs should come at the expense of human lives.

There is no clear evidence that programs funded by cigarette taxes would be hurt. Institutions like First 5 – a program that, in part, helps new parents stop smoking – are guaranteed a restoration of funding as tobacco sales go down.

Opponents point out that this may increase state spending and further indebt the state. If there are provisions to provide funding for anti-tobacco groups regardless of tobacco sales, the money will undoubtedly have to come from another source.

But if people buy less tobacco, there is less need for anti-tobacco organizations. The problem takes care of itself.

A $748,000 grant given to the University of California will allow campuses systemwide to start offering online classes. UC Davis is expected to offer as many as six of these courses beginning winter 2012.

The development of an online program will cost UC an average of $75,000 per course. This is a sure money-saving technique in difficult financial times and it is good to see university officials exploring all options to close the budget deficit.

Despite UC’s current financial state, the quality of classes shouldn’t be sacrificed to save a buck.

There is no substitute for an in-class experience. Not only are actual courses more beneficial to students, these classes will hold more weight with a potential employer. After all, there is a reason that online universities have less clout than four-year institutions.

While there is a place for online classes at UC, they should only be used as a last resort – for example, if somebody is one class shy of graduation. Online courses shouldn’t be implemented for classes that require face-to-face interaction, such as language classes.

Even though online classes can have beneficial effects for UC, one potential deal-breaker is that they present unbalanced opportunities to students. For instance, students taking Arnold Bloom’s Science and Society 25, Global Climate Change: Convergence of Biological, Geophysical and Social Sciences, will have two 50-minute lectures per week. Students taking the course’s online version will get five 20-minute sessions.

This seems fair, as both groups will receive 100 minutes of instruction. However, it presents an inequitable opportunity because students in the actual class will have access to in-class meetings as well as online lectures, while those taking it strictly online will only see the online sessions. All of these students will pay the same tuition, but not receive the same benefits.