Flying Gogoplata

It has come to my attention recently that running a search query for “sorority blog” on some search engines, my blog comes up on the list of results. I feel an urge at this point to explain myself and my particular depictions based on some of the feedback I have received from my local audience. Then again I don’t think I’ve written anything worth apologizing for either. I have two sets of pieces in my “Sorority Girls” category: those addressing my experience in the History of Information course and those addressing my relationship with Kappa Kappa Gamma. The former was fairly insincere snobbery and the latter was a sincere reach-out.

Looking back on it, I probably would not have written or titled the first two pieces the same way if I were writing them now. I’m on this stint of exploring stereotypes and trying to expose them wherever they come up, but there’s a large part of me that wants to believe there some validity or justification to subscribing to these stereotypes over others, as these boys and girls (as these societies are undeniably structurally gendered) collectively represent a society of exclusion that I try to actively work against in the communities in which I’m involved. And there is also something about the sorority girl stereotype that makes it easy to explain the different modes of discourse between a Cognitive Science and a Mass Communications major that the nuances in the modes of discourse don’t reach without much more effort.

However, it is obviously hypocritical to then ask my house mates to drop those same stereotypes and biases for the purposes community building with our neighbors. In my attempts to give the benefit of the doubt I think I may have inadvertently reinforced some of them to my local community. At the same time I’m still not entirely sure a large chunk of my intended audience was ever reached to begin with. I am still happy with what I wrote in the last two pieces, but I would have liked them to hold more weight in the real world.

There have been some odd occurrences in my life at a time which I would have otherwise considered to have a dull dip in pace.

It seems as if my best friend and my blog workshop cohorts are not the only ones who read my blog. I recently received an emailed response to my ranting posts regarding the OCF downtime from the Secretary of the OCF. I hope to respond to this email soon as I’d like to be able to clarify some of my sentiments as well as address some of the recent updates, but I am very glad my writing managed to find its way to its secondarily intended audience.

For those of you who enjoyed my invitation letter, something happened to day that I don’t think has ever happened before. Not only did two different groups of Kappa sisters wave hello to me through the dining room window, they initiated the wave without my prompting! Now at this point I have no idea if they had gotten a hold of my blog post from this website, from my facebook notes (which import this blog), whether Brenna (their President) told them about me, whether Sam (our social manager) told them about me, or whether they just felt inspired to be neighborly of their own good spirits. But also at this point, I really don’t care. Thank you Kappas! You have reinvigorated my belief in the spirit of neighborhood!

Last (but of course, not least) I finally solved Rubik’s Cube! I did so on a total fluke, sliding faces without keeping track of the moves just to experiment with how pieces changed position based on the concepts we’ve been learning in the class. And all of a sudden all the faces were solved! It’s not anything I think I can repeat in practice at the moment, but I sort of get conceptually why it ended up that way. I think I have officially received my Nerd Badge for completing Rubik’s Cube.

The weather has cooled to a comfortable temperature, but I don’t think I’ll follow through on my promises just yet. I also don’t think I can hang out on the balcony in short sleeves too much longer…

Good Night!

To The Sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma:

I must admit that the fervor which initially inspired this letter has subsided somewhat, but the sentiment continues to be relevant. For the past six months or so I have been conducting a warm spirited experiment with the residents of your house in an attempt to shrink the chasm between our houses to the size of the driveway that physically separates us. I have noticed in my three years at Wolf House that interactions between us can only be characterized as minimal if not completely nonexistent. This is contrary to my upbringing, in which even when neighbored with assault-rifle-toting drug lords, nefarious gang members, and 60-year-old, blue-haired city councilwomen we would wave to each other when passing by despite our otherwise isolated lifestyles.

On any given day I’d say I cross paths with about 10 Kappas. Prior to the onset of the experiment, these encounters went like many on this campus: with no acknowledgment and with no eye contact. Now, I understand that there are 30 of us and 60 of you, there is a lot of turnover in both houses, we don’t know each other at all, and that there is no history of interaction, but I found it quite sad that two closely situated neighbors couldn’t even give so much as a hello.

So I sought to correct this. I started waving and smiling to every Kappa I crossed paths with. I got nothing in response. Now, most of this is understandable. The majority of the time I see a Kappa is when she is walking in the kitchen door of her house, which happens to face the giant window to our dining room. As you walk in your door you face away from our window and have no reason to look in to Wolf House despite the fool waving at you. You have no good reason to look in because we’ve never given you one. And similarly with when you walk out. Your attention is directed firmly towards the sidewalk and though the waving fool is obviously in your peripheral field of vision, you have no reason to attend to an area that has no previously marked importance for you.

But then there are those times when one of you will look me dead in the eye and purposefully ignore me. Even that I can grant a benefit of the doubt as eye contact can be read either as aggression or as welcome. But then there was that one of you who stood outside your door, talking on the phone, actively refusing to acknowledge my existence. I waved, varied speed and reach, varied my position, all the while knowing I was in direct line of sight. All I received in return was avoidance. In my absolutely stubborn determination to get you to respond I continued to wave through the remainder of your phone conversation, until you ultimately got up and left. Now again, I may have misjudged your line of sight because of the stunna glasses you were wearing, but I was nonetheless left disillusioned with my quest.

There has been a lot of misunderstanding of my goals among my housemates regarding the purpose of my experiment. Some have thought I was being facetious or mocking. Others have taken me seriously but thought the goal foolish and futile. Others assumed I knew someone there. I can imagine that similar kinds of confusion and misunderstanding is on your end, as well as generally not knowing that I am even doing this, which may contribute to this noticeable lack of response. The previously illustrated encounter inspired me to write this open letter, in the hopes that some of you may read it and know that my goal is only to be neighborly. We’re all students here, we live next to each other, there is no good reason I can think of as to why we can’t greet each other if only briefly when we pass by. So I invite you, the Sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma, to not only make note of and respond to my greetings, but to initiate this spirit of neighborliness with other Wolves, and others in the neighborhood.

Now after having said all that, I would like to let you know that the outlook hasn’t been entirely grim. Most of the people who have seen me wave have returned the favor. I have even had the opportunity to hang outside the window and have brief conversation with a couple of you. I have a friend from my first year dorm that lives there and I have been happy to see on the street on a more frequent basis, and I have had the opportunity to speak to your current president. They may (or may not) be able to vouch for my not being a creep. And even if I was, my housemates are not. I think we can all benefit from a little neighborliness in our daily routine of social avoidance.

Sincerely,
Dimas Guardado, Jr.
(Waving Warmly)

So there’s a bit of a backlog on this section. This one is from last week and later I will write on another one from the same day. Hopefully this will fill in the gap in the event nothing else of note happens in the class.

Now this quote was spoken by a man (based on all the perceptual information one could gather from hearing a voice and looking over your shoulder in a lecture hall), so this kind of illustrates the idea that it isn’t sorority girls that are the sole victims of this kind of behavior, but that this kind of behavior activates this (stereotypical) mental frame about how sorority girls behave in these contexts.

Anyway here goes:

So the course is taught by two professors, both of whom in covering the history of print and other information technologies have 1) gone to great depths to ensure that these very large technological “revolutions” are not taken to be reducible to a single event, institution, technology, rather the result of the interaction of all these things in a specific context among other social, political, economic, societal factors 2) Have talked at length about how no single institution, in particular capitalism, can be pointed to as the cause of these changes 3) Have admitted that the case of the press is one in which this very early form of capitalism aids in its rapid growth and is in many ways responsible for its rise to prominence, but the previous two points still hold, and 4) have illustrated the silliness of the reduction by comparing this situation to an identical one with different outcomes.

Professor: { Explaining how print rose to prominence in European society, the process involving these very early capitalist practices. }
Sorority Girl: So, it looks like technology only comes about because of capitalism.
Professor: …
Class: …
Sorority Girl: { Awaits response, Thoroughly impressed with himself for stumping the professor’s premises with his carefully crafted argument. In actuality the Professor and the class are dumbfounded at the fact that after hearing the premises and seeing why the premises are true that he would make such a statement with neither explanation nor qualification and be proud of himself. }

At this point the professor, out of his kindness of heart, can do nothing but repeat himself, albeit more briefly, and continue the lecture.

There will be more sorority girls later this week, and possibly a rant about how Sonja Sharp’s (and in fact, most people’s) complaints about LA are baseless and stupid. Possibly about how her column specifically and the Daily Cal in general are really lame.

In any case, more to come…

Now some of you may have noticed that a particularly adept and observant sources close to the president have pointed out that despite the fact that my girlfriend, Linda, is likely my entire audience, I have failed to mention the fact that she is currently in Moscow and that I miss her terribly.

This is in part intentional as I would like to keep my amateur blog from being a personal account of my sorrows a la LiveJournal. LiveJournal Style writings can be privately nestled in her email inbox where they belong, away from the prying public eye.

Instead, in her honor, I hope to have a recurring segment on this blog dedicated to her. The topic is one she has found really funny in the past, and I hope I can continue to be fed material for this often enough to continue the segment.

I have the rare pleasure of being enrolled in a course that is cross listed with Cognitive Science (my major), Information Systems and Management, and Mass Communications. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Mass Com has a reputation of being the realm of athletes and sorority girls. I am a nerd. It is rare that these ilk mix very often, particularly in a shared course of study. For illustration: I live in cooperative student housing that is next to the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority. Some of these people I’ve lived next to for two years and not even a hello has been exchanged besides the number of times our paths have crossed. It is even rarer that I have come across this type in my particular course of study, which tends to have a style, mode of presentation and discourse that I can only assume isn’t touched very often by those that I will ridicule in this segment. This has so far lead to some very interesting interactions between the professors and the students of different kinds.

Anyway, I realize that for the purpose of this segment I will be speaking to a stereotype that many sorority girls do not fulfill. I am aware of this. But I can’t help it if people go out of their way to fit the stereotype.

In the hopes that this isn’t all build-up with no payload, here goes.

The professor was “translating” an Ideographic message from Yukaghir (Siberia). The message was clearly iconic of the type of ambiguity that Ideographic systems have, and a common example (much like the two trains problem with algebra). Further his explanation was clearly rehearsed and on his slide. His quick wit and thorough translation of the symbolism was to be expected; it wasn’t on the fly.

Sorority Girl: (thoroughly impressed) Did you, like, take a class to learn how to read these things??

Professor: …

Class: …

Professor: I’m actually fluent in Siberian Ideography

Class: *Chuckles*

Sorority Girl: …

Professor: No, uh, it’s just a common example.