Fact: Every 21 hours there is another rape on an American college campus. Fact: College women are most vulnerable to rape during the first few weeks of the freshman and sophomore years. Fact: 90 percent of all campus rapes occur under the influence of alcohol. Fact: These facts sound just as familiar as a Friday night spent with your head in the toilet from drinking one too many shots of tequila. Observation: we know we should be scared of alcohol, but we’re not. Why?

Think about it.  When was the last time you watched your parents sit around the fireplace and enjoy a line of cocaine? How often did your mother add a dash of meth to her pasta sauce, or cleanse your wounds with pills of ecstasy? Now replace all of those scary drugs with alcohol — sounds like a pretty typical Tuesday night at home, doesn’t it?

Alcohol has been present in our lives from the get-go. We’ve slowly developed our trust with the substance; we watched it sit on the countertop in those big, pretty red bottles — from our first soccer match to our senior prom.

So when we’re offered that first sip of “Natty Light” at a college party, the revolting taste is, understandably, accompanied by an instinctive feeling of safety. Alcohol’s familiarity makes a shot of vodka look just about as terrifying as a shot of Arrowhead water.

But, I’ll let you in on a little secret. That vodka you’re drinking is about as close to what your parents are drinking as grape-flavored candy is to actual grapes. College kids can hardly pay for a much needed bar of soap, let alone a bottle of Pinot noir. So instead we buy whiskey – with an alcoholic content around 60 percent (six times more alcoholic than the average wine bottle). I mean hey, more alcohol for less money — good deal, right? Kind of — but here’s the problem: Whiskey, and most hard liquor, tastes more like lighter fluid then alcohol. And sorry, but nobody likes “sipping” lighter fluid.

But it seems like a good idea to pour gallons of hard liquor down our throats at once.  Why prolong the wait to feel those fun effects anyways? If I feel happy after two shots, aren’t I going to feel like a unicorn in Candy Land after 10? It seems like a logical conclusion to jump to. More always seems better. But the faster we drink, the less likely we are to stop when the fun does. Soon enough, alcohol’s effects start to feel less like a euphoric high and more like a repulsive stomach flu. And I don’t know about you, but I’m hardly ever able to find Candy Land in a toilet filled with my own vomit.

So why is college drinking so dangerous? It is dangerous because our brains are more sensitive to alcohol. It is dangerous because we don’t know how to drink or what we’re drinking, so we mindlessly drink past the point of making responsible, logical decisions. And it is dangerous because 90 percent of college student sexual assaults involve alcohol, and 100 percent of those instances could have been safer if we just understood that alcohol isn’t.

There’s a reason your body forces the alcohol out of you. There’s a reason your mind blacks out and your body passes out. We’re not meant to drink in excess like this, and our bodies are desperately trying to tell us to stop. You might not have listened to your body before, but you can listen to me now: Don’t high five about “forgetting the night.” Last time I checked, drunk driving, suicide and rape were not and will never be “cool.”

Alcohol might make your mom laugh a little harder at your dad’s jokes, but when used in excess, it can also turn ignorant people into complete monsters. I don’t hate alcohol, and I definitely don’t want to discourage the occasional good time. I just think that before you go to another frat party on Friday night, maybe think about drinking a substance you can actually stand to swallow.
Like her bluntness? Contact MADDY PETTIT at mepettit@ucdavis.edu.

Graphic by Jennifer Wu.

If there’s one thing that’s safe to say about college, it’s that when you go there, life changes. Everything starts to get more complicated. Some people thrive on the complexity, while others (like me) often find themselves lost in reverie, dreaming of simpler times. As pastimes go, this one is bittersweet; even while the memories bathe us in their warmth, their frailty as mere imaginings lends a melancholy tint to their glow.

Few things trigger this melancholy more powerfully than returning to places we once knew. When I go back and wander the streets of my childhood, I find myself surrounded by time capsules attesting to all my past selves and states of mind. The local park where my friends and I always used to meet; the corner café we used to frequent, where now no one knows my name. These places and many others are emblems of a past I cherish, and life has changed so much since then that it sometimes knocks me breathless thinking of how much I wish I could live in them again.

But as I was walking at the Cosumnes River Preserve south of Sac the other day, I was struck by a strange realization. Through all the times I’ve been there and all the memories I’ve made, in the coalescence of my thoughts of it there is no tinge of loss. I remember the still air of the autumn dawn I saw just after I moved into my first apartment. The pale orange haze and the half-deserted trees it softened with tentative warmth reminded me that even as one time draws to a close, others begin. Then there was the bright spring morning when I first brought my best friend there, and that glowing evening long before I came to Davis when my parents and I watched sandhill cranes fly into the sunset. And then there was that time just a few weeks ago, when the day had proven too heavy but Cosumnes ushered me into its quiet night with gentle and caring arms.

All of these are times I’ll never have back, moments that will never repeat. And yet with this truth I find myself oddly at peace. The memories of Cosumnes do not feel distant to me, they are not part of some remote and inaccessible reality to which I am enthralled. As I’ve come to realize, this is because over the course of my time with it, Cosumnes has grown and changed alongside me. Unlike the buildings and boulevards of my adolescent wanderings, its natural display renders no static images. With every experience I’ve had there and each second I’ve spent, I’ve received something new, another layer of understanding of the place and of my place in it. I’ve seen it develop through days, seasons and years, and mirrored in its passage I’ve seen my own.

The amazing truth is that this continual transformation underpins all things, even those we want to deem “permanent.” What we learn through nature is that the only thing that’s permanent is life’s constant change. Like the throng of water comets John Muir once saw in Upper Yosemite Falls, life is made of a tumult of moments, “ever wasting, ever renewed.” Unknowable before they occur and starting to fade the instant they do, these moments come and go in continuous flow, with infinite freshness and boundless originality. In things that we build and attempt to control, this flow is often difficult to see. But in nature, it is as present and obvious as the sun’s ongoing journey through the sky and the river’s never-ending exodus to the sea.

To understand the flow and to feel one’s place in it can help us see our memories in its context as well. All the moments we’ve known, whether loved, hated or dearly missed, have been instants along life’s path. They’ve shaped us into who we are, and holding them close to our hearts is one of the wonderful capacities that make us human. But it’s also important to remember that we only have this capacity because our consciousnesses, our selves, are here now. Life’s changes and complications are all part of the journey ending in the present moment, and it is in this moment we are always living. This means we won’t always be able to hold onto everything we once loved, but that’s OK; in each present moment, nature brings a million new wonders into the world, ready and waiting to be made into beautiful new memories.

So I encourage all of you to find time to seek out a wild place — try Cosumnes! And when time and circumstances allow, go there to soak in the changes and truly experience present-ness. Through nature, you can uncover the flow that’s always present but easily hidden in your own life.

For my part, when I’m not out there with you, I’ll be finding a new café where I can spend my lazy afternoons. Maybe someday, they’ll know me too.

Look up, look out, look around — change is in our nature.

If you have any questions or comments, want to get more in touch with nature, or just want a down-to-earth chat (I promise I don’t always talk like this!), feel free to contact me, NICK JENSEN, at njensen@ucdavis.edu.

Graphic by Jennifer Wu.

Privilege. If you’ve taken an -insert category here- Studies, or sociology class, you’re bound to have come across this term before. You’ve also probably been told that you have “privilege” and that you need to “check” it. But just so we’re all clear on what “privilege” is, Carmen from autostraddle.com defines privilege as a concept that “encompasses exclusive rights and resources only made available to members of a specific social group.”

But what does that mean?  It’s the idea that certain groups of people have access to more resources and rights than others as a result of federal policy. Quite often these people are white, cis gender, straight, male, able-bodied, neurotypical, Christian and (upper) middle class (often occupying these multiple identities, though if you occupy one of these you do experience privilege that those outside do not experience).

You’re probably wondering how privilege relates to self-care and community-care. Privilege is important because acknowledging your privileges due to your identities allows you to begin to understand that we might never know what it is like to be on the “other side.”  Acknowledging your privilege, naming your identities and thinking about your positionality in our culture allows us to hold ourselves accountable for our actions and words. It allows us to become more sensitive to the myriad of ways in which our actions and words, whether or not we say or do them without harmful intent, can be understood by others. It allows us to understand how the systems of power that interact with our lives, and the histories that underlie our own experiences, affect the ways we think of ourselves and others.

An easy way to illustrate this would be to look at #blacklivesmatter. During the beginnings of the #blacklivesmatter movement, privilege and the ways it can simultaneously benefit and inhibit a movement toward social change were a hot-button topic. In conversations about police brutality and racism in our culture many were deterred by the fact that the hashtag forefronted Black lives over “all” lives. Many saw, and still currently see the hashtag, which was generated by Black queer women, as exclusionary because of its focus on solely Black lives. They argued that we say that all lives matter because we are all human, all one “race,” all oppressed and all suffering. As many critiques of those comments have noted, that argument derails the conversation. It loses sight of the greater issue at hand – that Black bodies are denied the right to exist in our culture. For example, yes, as a person of colour I do face various racial and heteronormative obstacles, but this isn’t to the same extent as Black Americans because Asian Americans benefit from participating in a culture of anti-blackness. When a white or non-black person of colour tweets or blogs #alllivesmatter in reaction to #blacklivesmatter, it takes away the power and voice of the movement toward the end of white supremacy (one of the major structural issues which causes so much pain in our society).

So where does recognizing privilege come into play in self-care? By recognizing that I benefit from a system of anti-blackness, by understanding that yes all lives matter but that this conversation relates to anti-blackness and police brutality, I can begin to understand the ways that I can care for myself and for the communities I am a part of by aiding in dismantling anti-blackness. I can do this by retweeting and reblogging posts about anti-black racism, police brutality and #blacklivesmatter without editing or removing content from the original post. I can do this by showing up to rallies and allowing the voices of those affected to speak. I can do this by pointing out anti-black racism in conversations in my own community. I can do this by questioning my own understandings of what it means to be Asian American, as it relates to anti-blackness. I can do this by listening to the narratives of those from different positionalities, and attempting to understand through compassion and empathy – acknowledging at the same time that I might never fully understand.

When we discuss privilege and the ways it intersects with self-care and community-care, it is important for those of us in privileged positions to support those without privilege by shutting up. Simply shutting up and listening, understanding when it is one’s place to speak up and when it is one’s place to stand down can serve as a way to care for one’s self and the community.

By allowing members of other communities and positionalities the chance to speak on an issue that directly affects them, you allow yourself a chance to understand experiences that you might never face. You allow yourself a moment of pause to contemplate your own experiences and actions that might serve the detriment of another community. You allow unheard narratives to spread. You allow knowledge to be produced.

Speak up when others appear uncomfortable in conversation if someone makes a blatant or subtle offensive statement/joke. And be prepared to have a loving and honest conversation about why those remarks are oppressive, or at least attempt to have one. Step down when you do not have adequate knowledge regarding an issue. Step down when conversations of oppression do not directly affect your community. Step down when it is not your place to talk.

However when you speak up, come from a place of compassion because that is how change can begin to occur and how safe spaces can begin to be created.

Have I not adequately checked my own privilege? Want to tell me to stay in my own lane? Am I being too vague? Contact Gilbert Gammad at gdgammad@ucdavis.edu

Graphic by Jennifer Wu. 

If Facebook is forever, what happens after we die? This question has haunted my over-caffeinated brain since I was in elementary school. We were driving back from L.A. and my miniature self was sprawled across the back seat amidst a sea of empty Cheetos bags, Hit Clips cassettes and faded bedding. Drifting in and out of consciousness on the long drive home, I remember listening to a program on the radio about a man who’d recently died and what would become of his digital history.  Even though it was a long time ago, I remember lying down in the back seat and staring up at the stars through the rolled-up window. The program kind of scared me as well as the dark thoughts it asked me to think about: namely, death and the not knowing what comes after it.

I’m a little older now – or a lot older, depending on whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist – but I still think back to that radio program sometimes, especially when my mind wanders into the sensitive, yet endearing territory of contemplating my own and others’ mortality. It’s a beautiful thing, really, coming to terms with the fact that you can die at any moment and the possibility that it will be sudden, unexpected, slow or maybe even painful. Usually, it’s not something we like to spend time with in a social or public context, the whole reality of dying thing. But I wish talking about death could become more normalized in our society, to the extent that it will no longer be something to fear or feel anxiety toward, but rather something to inspire us like the mysteries of deep space. In fact, the crème de la crème of the hipster tech elite over at Facebook have recently released a new feature, one you may have heard of, called a “legacy contact.” In a nutshell, a legacy contact is the person who you want to take over admin control of your profile when you croak. If that’s not creepy enough for you, it gets better. What about the other aspects of the feature, like age requirement, being memorialized and how the contact can change/edit your profile photo? Like, what if it’s an ex-partner, or someone hacks into your account, designates themselves as your legacy contact without your knowing, then straight up has you killed only to completely defile and bash your reputation once you’re dead??? Phew. Good one, Facebook.

This brings me back to the purpose of mentioning the radio program and the crux of my argument: the technology we use to live our lives has redefined what it means to die. As a result, technology also transforms what it means to live because, let’s face it, dying in 2015 doesn’t look the same as dying in our parents’ generation. From the moment we activate our accounts across our varied platforms to the moment our feed literally stops refreshing, our digital selves are eternally preserved in the collective consciousness. I cringe a little at the thought of all the tens of thousands of terabytes of ghost data – images, blogs, emails, the transcripts of late-night conversations with strangers in chat rooms – where do all those files go? Would Dante deem it necessary to designate a tenth circle of suffering for those of us condemned to a life of eternal sorting, archiving and deleting? Can you even erase a person’s digital history? I’m dying to know.

After all, what is more permanent than the experience of death itself?

Whitney Davis enjoys bad puns and oscillating between positive and negative poles. Drop her a line at wmdavis@ucdavis.edu

Graphic by Jennifer Wu.