Election Day

College students lurk on street corners, soliciting themselves with glossy pamphlets in the white-collared costume of professionals. They spread their propaganda with the zeal of a wildfire, passing buttons in every classroom, slapping stickers in every hallway, and posting billboard-sized picket signs broad, twisted trunk of oak. They stake their territory and, in polished heels and starched pants, defend their claims.

The pinnacle of March Madness. The peak of political pressure. It’s no time to play nice. The claws are coming out.

Today is Election Day for LSU’s student government.

Tensions are high.

Candidates are strung out on caffeine pills and fueled by watered-down coffee and Winn-Dixie Danishes. They’ve been riding a three-week-long roller coaster of sleepless nights, underscored by campaign agendas and careful plotting. They cling to their ticket affiliation with an almost fanatical fervor. They intrude on the personal boundaries of passers-by, their arms flailing with campaign material, garnering votes with desperate pleas.

It’s beautiful psychosis.

For those students who rarely participate in politics on a national level, this local taste can be too much.

I should be out there campaigning right now.

So instead of being subtle, I’ll just cut the crap and say vote for me for UCFY Senator on the Palermo-Hathorn ticket. Log onto PAWS Do it. I can give the LSU political process a run for its money.

All right. I have done enough shameless campaigning for one day.

Octomom: Supplementing trash TV with Welfare payments

She's 33-years old, from Whittier, California. Jobless. In these times of economic struggle, she's a single mother, living with her mother in a three-bedroom home. Except there's a catch.

She's got 14 mouths to feed, all under the age of seven. 

Her name is Nadya Suleman. She's a trainwreck. And we can't look away.

On Jan. 26, Suleman gave birth to eight babies. Before she became pregnant, she was already the mother of six.

In a surprising twist of the Octomom saga, Suleman says it has been over eight years since she has had sex. Her oldest son is 7-years-old.

All 14 of the children were conceived through in vitro fertilization with sperm from a friend, David Solomon. 

Suleman met her baby's daddy at a nightclub. They went to the movies once, but Suleman claims she didn't want him to be her boyfriend. She had other plans for the direction of their relationship.

She wanted him to be the father of her children.

Suleman claims that Solomon has donated sperm for all of her children. Although Suleman talks to Solomon once a year, he does not see the children. 

In an interview with Associated Press, Suleman claimed that she wanted a huge family to make up for the "isolation" she always felt as a child. 

As a mother to so many children, she's replacing her isolation with neglect.

Good Morning America interviewed a potential "Octodaddy." Suleman's former lover Dennis Beaudoin claims that his "supersperm" sired the octuplets born to Suleman. Beaudoin says he donated sperm for Suleman's in vitro fertiliation plans while they were seriously involved between 1997 and 1999--according to Beaudoin, he offered to help her conceive after Suleman reportedly told him she had ovarian cancer.

 

Suleman has denied Beaudoin's claims that he has fathered any of her children. It was the donor after Beaudoin that "worked," said Suleman, making Solomon, the true father of her octuplets.

Beaudoin believes there is a family resemblance and is seeking a DNA test to prove his claims. If he is the true Octodaddy, he aims to shoulder the burden.

Suleman insists she never claimed to have cancer.

Unlike Jon and Kate plus 8,  Suleman has missed many opportunities to secure a spot in Hollywood. Although initially open to working with Suleman, TLC has since decided not to pursue any program involving Octomom and her party of 14. While wishing the family best of luck, other TV networks are following suit. Suleman's options for baby-induced fame are dwindling.

For now, Octomom is in a bind. Publicists don't want to represent her, Dr. Phil wants to give her a reality check. Her own father has publicly condemned her "irresponsibility," while openly begging public financial support. 

For Octomom and her children, Welfare is going to be on the menu for a long time. 

Writing love on her arms

It was 2 o'clock in the morning. 

I had spent my night wading through the treacherous realms of my Anthropology textbook. Darwin. Speciation. With my brain fried and my body's cry for sleep making me delusional, I knew I needed a break. Despite the essays I still had to write and the French I needed to study, I put my head down to recover. It would only be for a couple minutes, I told myself.

 I immediately drifted to sleep on the computer keyboard.

And then I heard a furious buzzing, making me jump from my chair and rub my eyes. After curiously staring  at the face of my digital clock, I picked up my phone. 

Unknown number. February 9th, 2:15 am.

It was The Text. The one that opened my eyes to someone else's pain, someone else's story. 

It was a plea for help, and I was physically sick. 

"Hey girl, it's me. I really just want it all to end. I can't take it anymore. I can't."

Her name is Joy, 17-years-old and in an emotional ditch--struggling to break to the surface of her despair. It's a dance I know well. The tumultuous sashay of high school drama and the casual decay of naiveté that follows, performed in tandem with swaying adolescent hips and the screams of an alcoholic parent who cares too little, too late. 

I don't know how or why this Missouri girl got my number, but I felt compelled to talk back. She was trying to reach a friend from back home in the Woodlands; our numbers were crossed in some silly limbo of fate. I listened for hours as she trusted me, a stranger, with a tale of scandal in the family, emotional abandonment by her parents, and a move from Texas that accelerated her life into collapse. 

She opened the floodgates of her pain and engulfed me in a dark world, twisted, oppressive, and mature beyond my comprehension-- it's a reflection of a life I would fear to endure as lonely as she. 

It's a living hell, and it puts my heart on the verge of shattering.

Addicted to drugs. Drunk on weekends. She's trying to be a normal teenager, playing soccer and volleyball on her school's varsity team, while playing "mom" to five young, neglected siblings. Dealing with a cheating boyfriend. A dad who never calls. A mom who is never around. 

Feeling nothing. 

With a world spiraling inexorably out of control, she traces the veins on her arms with knives and paperclips, defining her anguish with rows of crimson. When the streams heal, the scars endure-- a written history all her own, carved into flesh.

It's so she can feel something, control something, she said. But this time, she told me, she wanted to die.

I'm getting a glimpse of a different life, yet surprisingly bound to my own. Shards of my own past run parallel to her own, but her hurts swept her in a different direction, towards other outlets for her pain. 

It's been a few weeks, and we still talk from time to time. Since that night of tears and unleashed fears, I have been haunted by another's phantasmagoria. Perhaps just listening to her was enough, perhaps that's all she needed to convince herself there was something worth living for. 

She told me no more drugs, no more cutting, no more alcohol--she wants to change. But I know it will be hard for her to do it alone.

I'm still growing, I'm still praying. And I'm realizing how insignificant my own demons really are.

Dodging beads: An outsider's perspective on Mardi Gras

Bourbon Street on a Saturday night is ridiculous. But when you add the upcomiong Fat Tuesday into the mix, and a fine medley of crazy results. For someone foreign to Louisiana, the exchange of bright beads with partial nudity is lewd, crude, and downright intriguing. Before I left for LSU, my mom had given me a hug and told me to have fun. "When in Rome, do what the Romans do, babe," she said.

So I decided I had some exploring to do.

Born in Massachusetts and raised a Texas girl, I took in the festivities through unbiased and sober eyes. The masked men on the floats terrified me. I watched my friends willingly get pelted with beads, and finally my turn came around. A grotesquely fat man in a Joker outfit planted a five pound bag of beads on my face.

On my face, for crying out loud.

I could have sworn he was aiming. After being helped up and wiping the beer-thickened mud off my jeans, the beads kept coming. Not only that, but my feet hurt from standing and my ears were throbbing from all the drunken screams when Kid Rock rolled by. Please.

Or maybe I'm just a bad sport. Maybe.

When the Endymion parade was over, my friends had the brilliant idea to trek over to Bourbon Street. Two words: body paint. On overweight women, on men in thongs. It was gloriously disgusting, but all "part of the experience." I was promised me a beignet trip on the way out of the French quarter, so I decided to tag along. But the line was too long at Cafe du Monde. Instead of beignets, I was condemned to hell 15 times over by the radical Christians screaming around Jackson Square, and took refuge in what turned out to be "The most visited gay bar in New Orleans!" We walked back down Bourbon to get pelted with more beads, tops flying up in a rhythmic stream of grivoiserie. Well, at least the gay-bar had clean restrooms.

Next year I'm going to Canada instead.

Where I'd Rather Be

I want to feel the the sun raging on my skin as dust whirls and swells across arid African plains, coarse grass shimmering by my Jeep in a blur of silk. I crave to be behind the lense of my Canon Rebel, capturing the culture, living for the outdoors, sleeping under the stars, and following forbidden trails that map the desires of my heart. I desire to seek the rare glimmers of the primal and the primitive. I yearn to escape from the monotony of the civilized. 

And I want to get paid to do what I love-- to engulf myself in a world beautiful and austere. This office job just doesn't cut it. As much as daydreams tear down my patience, the vision of traveling the world as a photojournalist for National Geographic is both my motivation and my yoke. It grips me, it calls me. It's a reverie as comfortable and worn as the soles of my shoes.

As a college student, It's accepted that if we hit the books now, our dreams will naturally follow suit. But as people change, so do their destinies--our futures throb to the cadence of our own lives, held to the rhythmic strum of our actions and decisions. 

Ask your professor, your parent, the lonely man in the supermarket: Are you the person you always hoped to be? Are you pursuing the life you dreamed of? Listen. How many of them chased dreams of ballerinas or baseball players? It's a desolate life when one locks their dreams away. It's a void, an abyss, an absence of hope. An existence forsaken.

I hope someday my passion and my career intersect, and what I love is in perfect equilibrium with what I do.

So for now, I guess I'll get back to daydreaming. For now, I'll study hard and believe that making the grades will be redemption for my soul-searching. On those tortured evenings when this is not enough, I'll strap on my hiking boots and content myself with a starless Louisiana night, miles away from my heart.

Summer in a Snapshot

I've never particularly liked Tuesdays, but this one reminds me of home when I was just a kid. Home on the outskirts of the country, where white-picket fences dotted the horizon. Sitting on porch swings, spitting watermelon seeds, listening to my Grampy talk about growing up as cigar smoke billowed around in a comforting shroud. About the times I used to see the future as something that stretched as endlessly as the Texas sky.

I’m cutting class for the afternoon, sitting Indian-style on the parade grounds. The weather wonderful—warm enough to shrug off my sweater, but chilly enough for visions of sunburns and lemonade. I can almost taste the salt water, the coconut suntan lotion; I can almost feel the sand shifting underfoot.

Just a beautiful day, thawing away three weeks of stress. Perfect.

The light stings my eyelids, so I close my eyes and listen. Frisbees drone overhead, soccer balls swish and thump as they pass underfoot. Campus buzzes with good-spirits, appearing from beneath scarves and boots and winter hats. Dancing in the sunlight, sashaying in the oaks. Awakened.

At moments like this, living comes so naturally.

I shudder as a thick shadow steals over the grounds. The breeze whips my hair across my face. Icy tendrils of wind pelt my neck and arms. Squinting, I look up. A bruise is lurching overhead. Storm clouds stain a blue, crystal sky.

The parade grounds clear, leaving me alone with my thoughts. With a broken umbrella as my only backup plan, I hug my sweater tight and head home—back to the mundane, back to mediocrity.

It’s enough to remind me that moments like this are fleeting. Even beauty chooses to linger in rarity. Perfection is a snapshot.

It’s wintertime in Baton Rouge, but summer’s blooming.

Gravity equals Tragedy? No way, honey. Not anymore.

I was in love once.

Falling for someone is exactly how it sounds: A complete absence of control. One second, you've got two feet planted on solid ground. The next, you're sucked back down to your knees-- mouth dry, stomach knotted, spiraling until you forget what it's like to stand. It's exhilarating. It's frightening. It's gravity at its best.

I was in love once.

My parents weaned me on individuality. Miss Independent, vulnerability has never been a favorite of mine. And then I fell hard. Love gave life to my my fortified sense of romance. First came attraction, then came surrender.

I once was helplessly in love.

It crushed, it tore, it burned. It was beauty, it was brokenness, it was sustenance. And in the end, it mourned.

I was in love. Once.

Thriving on sass and scoffing at convention, I embraced sovereignty with a flourish. I was the girl who grew up too fast. Now, I'm a woman confused, still choking on regret and bad timing.

I was in love once. But my heart's still beating, so I'm moving on.