Tag Archives: Disappointment

My Take on Carnegie Mellon University

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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View of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon lawn, Pittsburgh, PA, October 22, 2012. (http://www.broadwayspotted.com/).

It’s with extreme disappointment in which I write my latest post, this one on Carnegie Mellon University, or as the locals and attendees call it, CMU (sorry, Central Michigan University folks). But I feel I have little choice, given the amount of crap I’ve received over the past few months from my doctoral institution. The alumni association and the fundraising people at Carnegie Mellon ask me for money at least twice a week, and don’t seem to get it when I say “no” or “never” or even “when Hell freezes over.” I’ve known creditors less persistent about getting money out of people than the fundraising arm of Carnegie Mellon.

The last straw for me, though, was last week. I received three emails on the same day, not to mention a letter in the mail, all asking for donations. One also included an alumni survey, which I dutifully filled out and rated Carnegie Mellon at the low-end of every category in the survey. “Not only do I not mentor my students or aspiring college students about Carnegie Mellon,” I said. “I go out of my way to make sure that they do not ever consider applying to or attending Carnegie Mellon,” I added at the end of the survey.

Romney in 47 Percent Video, September 18, 2012. (Joe Pompeo/http://capitalnewyork.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws – cropped/low resolution.

I don’t think that the alumni association or the fundraisers really understand the depths of my disappointment regarding my four years at CMU between ’93 and ’97. I found the university culture about as welcoming as going to a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton, and with many folks from the same crowd as well. Anytime your campus refuses to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday, or insists on having Dinesh D’Souza give a two-hour talk on race without an opposing viewpoint, it’s a stifling place. A campus in which the College Republicans stage marches while not having a strong College Democrats or progressive group in place is a bastion of conservatism, not just politically, but socially as well.

In four years, I became friends with a very small group of students and professors. I would’ve made more of an effort, if I hadn’t been told practically from day one that my master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and my other achievements meant little because, well, I had a degree from Pitt. And these sentiments came from my professors!

From my fellow students — who often walked by me as if I were a ghost until I forced them to say “Hi” — there was the impression that I must’ve gotten into the History program under some “special dispensation,” as one White guy put it. Yeah, my M.A. — earned in two semesters with a real committee examination — and a year of PhD work had nothing to do with my ability to write rings around my fellow students!

All in all, my Carnegie Mellon experience only worked out as well as it did because I reached out beyond my department and beyond the university to maintain connections and friendships with real people. My list of good folks at Carnegie Mellon is pretty short. The late Barbara Lazarus (see my post “Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Barbara B. Lazarus” from July ’09), Susan McElroy, John Hinshaw (who himself didn’t talk to me for two years after I’d gotten a Spencer Fellowship), and “My Friend Matt” (September ’12). The Black Graduate Student Organization (or BGSO), the graduate students of color/women graduate students working group that Barbara headed, and our group of fourteen doctoral students of color (the total number of non-White and non-Asian PhD students at Carnegie Mellon). That and playing intramural and pick-up basketball as much as three times a week were the sum total of my positive people and experiences at CMU.

Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, or “the new sanitarium,” October 22, 2012. (via Wikipedia).

I spent the majority of my non-classroom time on Pitt’s campus hanging out with friends there, working on my dissertation, meeting with some of my former professors, or otherwise enjoying my status as an alumnus. If anything, I needed to walk across that bridge between Carnegie Mellon, Schenley Park and Pitt as much as I did in order to keep my sanity, to make sure that I was essentially the same person I’d been while going to grad school with comparatively less uptight folk.

Of course, I could also go on about how my experiences with Joe Trotter as my advisor (see my “Outrage, Maybe” post from May ’10) turned me into an anti-Carnegie Mellon advocate, or how the sanitarium look of the university buildings could leave Polyanna depressed. But for those involved in alumni fundraising and related tasks at Carnegie Mellon, get this. I will never, ever, ever, give CMU one penny of my hard-earned dollars. I’d sooner give my idiot ex-stepfather a penny at his grave before you could pry a cold copper piece out of my hands, alive or dead. As far as I’m concerned, you owe me for four years of unnecessary anguish in the midst of my determined success.

This Is No Korra-Nation

14 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, Youth

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Avatar: The Legend of Korra – Welcome to Republic City (game screen shot), April 10, 2012. (Harryhogwarts via Wikia.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because image is only being used to visually identify the subject.

I wish that this was only a pun. But, Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s Avatar: The Last Airbender spinoff The Legend Of Korra was only a legend in their own minds. It’s not that Korra’s first season wasn’t a good one. It’s that Korra could not possibly live up to what was the greatest animation series of all-time.

Any fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender couldn’t help but be disappointed with the first season of Korra. First, it took four years for them to bring Korra to Nickelodeon, and a full twenty months after they released the first stills for the new series in August ’10. They wasted two of those years making the terrible live-action The Last Airbender (2010) as directed by M. Night Shyamalan (see my “The Last Airbender, or Shyamalan’s Cynical Egg?” post from July ’10).

Korra, Avatar: The Legend of Korra (artwork), October, 2011. (http://fanpop.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as image is only being used to identify blog subject.

So Korra was behind the 8-ball already when the show officially launched in April. Then the first episode began, exploding through waterbender Avatar Korra’s growing-up years in about three and a half minutes. That opening scene set the tone for all twelve of the first season’s episodes. One could sort of justify the rapid pace of Korra because she’d already mastered three of the four elements and because the spin-off had moved seventy years into the future, and a somewhat modern one at that. But the pace left little room for character development and the clear-cut personality distinctions that made Avatar: The Last Airbender the ultimate experience.

It took three episodes for me to find a good-and-honest scene that produced a personality quirk (see Bolin as a poor man’s Sokka here) and a hearty laugh. You got no sense of how Tenzin became part of Republic City’s council, or how tension-filled his life must’ve been as the responsible son of the great Avatar Aang. The elderly Katara appeared in a couple of scenes, and there was no attempt to explain the intervening years between the end of the Hundred-Year War until the last couple of episodes. Even then, these were fleeting scenes in a fast-paced, let’s-get-Korra-to-the-Avatar-State season.

The sheer lack of an attempt at authenticity with Korra, though, was what I found most disappointing. Seven decades into the future with modern technologies would create cultural tensions for sure, but it certainly wouldn’t wipe out the traditions of the four nations, even in Republic City. That, and only flashes of the spirituality that was completely infused in Avatar: The Last Airbender, made Korra a poor facsimile for whatever tensions between tradition and modernity that the main character faced in the first season.

I plan to watch Season 2, assuming that DiMartino, Konietzko and Nickelodeon plan on putting out a second season of Korra now that Season 1 is over. But I’ve lowered my expectations for the new series, especially if the creators intend to continue to rush through plots. It was as if Avatar Korra was on an out-of-control 2 Subway rumbling through Midtown Manhattan, about to flip over and derail.

After The Fall

18 Friday May 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, race, Youth

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The planet Caprica under nuclear attack, Battlestar Galactica (2003), September 28, 2011. (Gary Hutzel/SyFy Channel via http://soundonsight.org). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution of picture.

Fifteen years ago this date, I officially graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with my PhD, no thanks to Carnegie Mellon itself (see my post “The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style” from August ’11). I’d been done with the dissertation since the Friday before Thanksgiving ’96, so the ceremony itself was anticlimactic. The week of my graduation, though, revealed more about my mother and the ugly truth about how conditional our relationship was than I knew or thought possible (see my post “My Post-Doctoral Life” from May ’08 for much more).

All of that was on top of a week that included doing an interview at Teachers College, going to my mother’s associate’s degree graduation and being followed while Black at the Barnes & Noble that used to be on 66th and Broadway in Manhattan. That week came on the heels of recovering from the ordeal that was the political struggle over my dissertation process with Joe Trotter (see my “You’re Not Ready” and “Running Interference” posts from November ’08 and April ’11).

By the time I went back into town with my girlfriend (now wife of twelve years) Angelia from Pittsburgh International Airport, I was in a space I hadn’t been in since the late spring and summer of ’82. The “summer of abuse” at 616, as I call it now (see my “To My Ex-Stepfather” post from July ’09).  My pursuit of higher education, then advanced degrees and career options, and all of the success — direct, collateral and otherwise — that came with that striving and those triumphs was apparently a lot of what had kept me grounded for the previous fifteen years.

Lava lake, Mount Nyiragongo (volcano), Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo, May 7, 2011. (Cai Tjeenk Willink via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Now that I was done, and I was able to see people for who they really were, I found myself unbound. A deep well of rage — along with a bucket of betrayal with which to haul it up — was suddenly available to me, and would remain so for years to come. For the first time since the beginning of my sophomore year at Pitt, I felt despair, as if I was homeless and sleeping on a stairwell landing in Forbes Quadrangle again. I spent that cab ride back to East Liberty in an emotional fog, somewhere between tearing up and ready to beat someone half to death.

Angelia brought me back to her place, made me sit down, and insisted that she make dinner for me. She pulled out of her freezer some leftover stir-fry vegetables and turkey from Thanksgiving ’96, and made it into a stir-fry over rice. I was about halfway through this meal before my brain began receiving messages from my normally precise palate. “Stop eating!,” my synapses started screaming. The food I’d eaten had probably gone bad long before Angelia had frozen it. And despite the sweet and sour and soy sauces, it also became apparent that the meat had experienced severe freezer burn.

Within a few minutes, I had severe bloating and pain in my stomach, and Angelia had given me water and Pepto Bismol to settle my stomach. She apologized, “Sorry, Donald,” with an ironic laugh, adding, “This just isn’t your day.” I went back to my studio apartment on Penn Circle South that evening, in pain in many more ways than one.

My intestinal pains became worse over the next three days. I wasn’t eating much to begin with, and what I

Chemical structure of bismuth subsalicylate, aka, Pepto Bismol, September 5, 2007. (Edgar181 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

had in my system as a result of Angelia’s poisonous gruel had resulted in an intestinal blockage. A clear-headed person would’ve gone to the ER and had himself checked out. But my brain was about as clear as a mushroom cloud in the middle of Central Park. I could barely move, it hurt just sitting up, and I cried, sometimes in my sleep. At some point, the pain in my gastrointestinal tract and the pain from my graduation ceremony merged as one and the same.

Was I experiencing some psychosomatic trauma? It wouldn’t have been the first time my emotional flaying manifested itself in my G/I tract. Angelia’s food may have been the catalyst, but the realization that my mother was never really on my side — along with my advisor and some of my friends — was the root cause.

By that Friday, I was able to eat again. But like my relationship with my mother, my intestinal tract has never been the same. Betrayal and loss of trust — and faith — will do that to the most confident of us.