~Wednesday~ Xolani and I rode the bus together this morning. It was running a little behind, arriving at our stop closer to 7:30 than 7:20.
Li’l Dino boarded at her stop and she said hello to me while touching my shoulder as she passed me.
Cell Phone Lady boarded at her regular stop and she was neither on the phone nor did she get on her phone the entire trip. Tawk Amongst Yaselves.
I staffed our Google Information Booth on The Brickyard from 11:00-1:00 today as part of our student e-mail migration to Google Apps @ NC State marketing campaign.
I went out at 10:30 and helped Rhonda set up a tent, three folding chairs, and two long folding tables holding two laptops on which students could sign up for their Google migration on the spot.
Then we spent the next couple of hours giving out pens on them that said, “Go Google” along with the URL: http://google.ncsu.edu and encouraged students who walked by to opt in to the beta currently available. Jason and Jen helped a few people who had started the migration, but who had run into one problem or another, and I was “mostly social.”
There was a charity fundraising event going on next to us, one of the fraternities raising money for children with cancer, where with a donation, guys were having their heads completely shaved. Some were hot. Others? Well, let’s just say that every exposed scalp is not a thing of beauty. All of their hearts, however, were in a place beyond reproach.
Starting at 4:30, I attended a very, very interesting lecture by Jackson Katz—an ex-football player, and now an educator, author, and film-maker—called: The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Should Help.
Taking a seat toward the back of the Campus Cinema, because I figured I’d have to leave to go to class at 6:00 before the lecture had finished, I heard my named called. I looked back to see Tierza and Casey—Gulf Coast ASB Team Alum—and I moved to a seat next to them.
I really liked the first half of the lecture in which Jackson’s passion shined as he hammered home on probably the most salient point of his lecture: Why calling sexual abuse and violence against women a “women’s issue” is a big, big mistake, the biggest being because in 98% of the cases the abuse is inflicted by men, and as soon as men hear it framed as a women’s issue, they tune it out. And the conversation that needs to take place to address this issue cannot take place without men participating.
I desperately wanted to see the second half of his lecture in which he shows “entertaining and disturbing clips from his award-winning videos, including Tough Guise, to accentuate the importance of understanding–and changing–the cultural environment that condones or promotes sexism and violence,” but at 5:50 he was still taking questions (which didn’t even seem to be winding down) about the lecture part, before moving on to the videos, and I had to leave to make class at 6:00.
Topics touched on throughout the lecture included male peer culture in schools and colleges, men’s uses of pornography, prostitution and stripping, sexism in the sports culture and the US military, the many intersections between racism and sexism, and the role of homophobia in all-male groups.
In class tonight, I brought up, and shared some of the points from the lecture, Predictably Irrational, which I attended last year on campus, and which was pertinent to tonight’s reading in The Wisdom of Crowds.
Dancing was lots of fun tonight. We had a fair number of dancers present, and there were a decent number of bar patrons, several of whom took the lesson.