Ramblings: Fair and Square

Okay chickadees, let’s make this lightening fast.

Stories I meant to tell you along the way:

1) The I’m So Cool I Need a Guitar Kid Story: So this one is pretty self-explanatory. There was a kid who, about three days into the program after he had achieved a modicum of friends decided he was going to start his own fund called the “I’m So Cool I Need a Guitar Fund” and go around asking for 1-2 quid donations from everyone on the program. Apparently- and this is ridiculous- enough people donated that he was actually able to buy himself a guitar! And now he goes around Oriel at random hours playing it and singing along. He’s not that good of a singer but it’s pretty funny whenever he & his following walks by.  Who did not find it very funny was the porter of Oriel who kept getting calls from fellows at odd hours of the night, and so the kid was porter-ized. I thought the guitar was confiscated but apparently not because now they’re playing it outside my window in the quad. :) Rock on.

2) I’m combining stories 2 and 3. So after I first met Cam, I saw him the next day as he was leaving his room (which is next to the Red & Green rooms, where I have class). He stopped and said, “Oi! Laura! This makes so much more sense now! You weren’t BBC all along!” which I found highly amusing. ^_^ He had been seeing me inside Pembroke and had been thinking I was Sarah for the better part of a week, before he knew me. He never asked Sarah about it, when he saw her in class every day wearing a completely different outfit than the one she had been wearing ten minutes ago because he thought he was mental. ^_^ When he found out he wasn’t, he was over-joyed.

And he actually went to Waterstones with me (to his credit) and I laughed when he started asking for book recommendations. I gave them to him and he kept saying, “Errrrr- no” over and over and concluded the whole thing by smiling and saying that he wished he read more. At the suggestion that MAYBE if he read one of my suggestions he would have read one more book than he had read yesterday was absolutely preposterous, of course. ;) lol.

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So those are my stories for now. Here goes my day-

Major: Poetry, I read my poem for the class, got a fairly useless “awww” and turned it in. I have faith in Julie, though– she’s a brilliant teacher and will definitely give me critical feedback (which I desperately need). We went through the 50 pages of poems we were assigned to read for homework [Writer Girl's friend has realized she cannot make a name for herself by saying she hates poetry that isn't a bad name, so she has decided to start getting attention by showing her 'true' emotions. Gag.] and watched some more slam. Claire (who is a so-so prose writer but FREAKING SPECTACULAR poet) performed a piece she wrote for Slam Poetry and she was AMAZING. I was totally envious and told her so- there aren’t words for how insane it was. ^_^

Oh! And whilst watching another slam Writer Girl’s friend said that anyone who is overweight shouldn’t be proud of themselves… which was INSTANTLY shut down by the rest of us. Most girls got legitimately angry, to their credit, and my teacher actually stopped class to give her own opinion…. ‘Twas frightfully wonderful to see that particular student legitimately criticized for saying something as mean-spirited as that in open forum. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who boils internally sometimes.

I ate with lunch with Sarah and Jessica (a girl who I see at a lot of activities who is super nice and loves Psychology ^_^) at the Mission, the only Mexican food place in Oxford.

Next was Bioethics (<3) where we spent the class discussing the moral issues concerning body modification, from the least extreme cases (like hair dye) to the most extreme cases (like Body Integrity Identity Disorder, where the sufferer honestly believes that their life would be much, much better if they could only amputate one of their own limbs: see the Wikipedia here.) It’s not as easy as you would think: most of the people who suffer from BIID end up amputating the limb themselves if a medical professional refuses to do it for them by trying to freeze and kill the limb or by placing it on a railroad track and waiting for a train.

Another thing we discussed is gender and how one classifies it (there are about seven different ways– you might not think things like “chromosomal gender” and “hormonal gender” but they are perhaps even more accurate than our traditional sense). Sarah (my teacher) has a friend who is on a bio-ethical review board for a hospital and she shared the following story.

At a particular time in Oxford, an unusually high number of children were being born with indiscriminate external genitalia and the hospital decided that they would simply perform surgery on each of these newborns to “make” them externally female (rather than male because the operation for becoming a female is easier). At the time, gender was thought flexible and a role assigned by society: if raised a male or female, the theory was that the child would automatically affiliate with that gender (biologically speaking- this is a ridiculous theory). These children were never told, nor were their parents, and recently these now-married women have flooded nearby hospitals trying to obtain fertility treatments because they find themselves unable to have children with their partners. They don’t have a uterus so they can’t ever have children, and the ethical concern is whether or not the doctors should tell them what happened to them.

Imagine if, one day, you found out that you had been raised your entire life as a gender that you might not be in a chromosomal sense. It is also likely that these women might have struggled with their sexual identity their entire life without ever knowing why, without telling anyone.

You can see how this question gets messy very quickly.

Another option the doctors have is to simply give the woman fertility treatments anyway and eventually have the couple give up without ever finding out the truth.

Another case we discussed was one in which a child was born with indiscriminate genetailia but who appeared mostly male but was chromosomally and hormonally female. The doctors wanted to convert the child to an external female but the parents did not want to because they had been told they were having a boy months before.

The question is: who gets to make this call? Does the doctor get to over-ride the parents? Do the parents trump the doctor? Or, the other option- should doctors do nothing at all and wait until the child is old enough to make the decision themselves?

Even if the last option seems preposterous to you, maybe that’s not because the choice is flawed but that society is flawed. Perhaps there needs to be a more open dialogue about what gender really means rather than the whole discussion being shrouded in shame and secrecy.

Just some thoughts.

After Bioethics I went to hear Tony Ben discuss US/UK relations, and I am sad to say I didn’t really learn all that much despite his international acclaim. One girl got super vicious during Q&A and started attacking Ben about his views about Palestine/Israel (Ben thinks Palestine and Israel should go back to the 1969 borders and mutually respect each-other’s sovereignty: definitely not the worst idea I’ve ever heard). The girl was Israeli and started asking, “How much do you want us to concede to the rebels in Palestine when they don’t even acknowledge our right to exist?” to which Ben articularly replied, “Last time I checked Israel doesn’t acknowledge Palestine’s right to exist.”

To which the girl got really hissy and started ranting, “Do you have any idea how much land we would lose! We won Palestine FAIR AND SQUARE.”

My question, personally: how do you win something ‘fair and square’? Like, what’s the difference between conquering and conquering ‘fair-and-square’? If it’s adhering to the Geneva conventions, Israel certainly didn’t do that.

So I’m just curious. ^_^ I don’t know enough about the whole issue to give you a fully developed argument and I will not assert my prowess in an area about which I know little, but I am extraordinarily tickled.

Did Napoleon win most of Europe fair and square? Did Hitler win France fair and square?

Are there take-back-sies? ;)

After the lecture I got a Oxford sweat-shirt, sweat-pants, strawberries and creme + Belgian chocolate fudge, and Diet coke. Then I went back to Oriel.

And so now I am watching my room darken as I do my coursework, and I must leave you.

:) Hope you enjoyed the post! I tried to load it with lots of thought-provoking thoughts.

Cheers!

Laura

PS: Any word on the delayed score yet? Please jet me an email and fill me in.

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