Ah, Fresher's week - I remember mine, something I am proud of, as I am probably one of the few at my uni who do - I love freshers week, so many new faces, new people, all looking to get as much cheap alcohol as possible because they are now free of their parents, free to do absolutely anything they want - but as I have said in one of my earlier posts, with freedom comes responsibility - and this is what this years new freshers will all learn - eventually. University is the biggest step to maturity for most people - developing people to realise what impact they have on the world around them, what influences them to make thier decisions, who they are, and finally, what they want to do for the rest of their life. But I don't think that Student unions are doing enough to help them learn these vital lessons quickly enough - I can guarantee that over 75% of all students at Lancaster, my own uni, will drink some alcohol this week, most of them in excess - this is not cynicism, this is reality - I have seen several freshers weeks already, this one will be no different. Now there is nothing wrong with drinking alcohol, in my opinion - a few drinks is a great way to get to know some people and make good friends - alcohol loosens you up, it makes you more prepared to get engaged in conversation and have a great night - it is what I describe as the social lubricant - but it is not without the dangers of too much:
You start coming around - your eyes are bleary and tired - you open them, and as light starts coming through them, the pounding begins - boom, boom, boom - you feel like a slow moving jackhammer is penetrating your skull, and the surgeon isn't using any anaesthetic - you drag yourself off the bed- wait, something's not right - you look around the room, seems normal enough, but then you start seeing different posters on the wall to your normal room - the duvet covers are different - this is not your room. Your ears start tuning into what you can hear - the shower in the en-suite is running. You hurriedly get up, headache still pounding, mouth is feeling dry. You find your underpants on the floor and put them on - backwards - you don't care, you just want to get out, what happened last night? you can't find the rest of your clothes, so still blurry eyed, you stride out into the corridor and trip over the traffic cone on the floor. finding your trousers in the hall, you make your way towards the door to the flat - until you hear the shower stop, and the lumbering beast of a woman is now standing in the corridor. You slept with HER? my goodness, you must've been wasted, you think - you stagger out, wanting to wake up and this nightmare to end - finding your shirt on the staircase, you lumber down and walk hurriedly back to your own room. After getting a spare key from your residence office for your flat, you get back in, and all over facebook are the pictures of you passed out on the floor, with various obscenities drawn in black marker on your face. you glance accross to the mirror and see them still there. you look back, and see the next picture - that woman, snogging you, is all over the internet. But the worst is, you will never forget the screams she made after you left her flat -"I have syphilis you know!"
Now okay, this is quite a story, but is quite real, for many people - it does happen, and it is totally not worth it - this would probably be the worst morning of your life - and even worse is that all too often, it happens the other way around, with the genders swapped. There is an easy way to tell the difference between your real friends, and the ones you oughtn't hang out with - your real friends will tell you the truth and tell you if you have had enough - the ones you want to keep away from are the friends who tell you to drink more because "you haven't had enough yet".
Freshers week can be such a dangerous week - like I said, alcohol removes inhibitions, so my advice is to go easy - you can have a great time without drinking too much! Here's my top tips for reasons to avoid too much alcohol:
1. I remember a friend of mine said once: "wow, I must have had such a great time last night, because I can't remember it!" I am sure you can see the stupidity - what is the point in having a good time that alcohol will just make you forget all about it anyway? It's as if it never happened.
2. having alcohol can make you do things you will regret later - would you rather go on a night out and have a good time, or go on a night out and say/do something that you regretted later?
3. Alcohol gives hangovers - Alcohol is not a substitute for water, and it will dehydrate you - this causes a hangover - whilst as there are some touted "hangover cures", the sure one to avoid it is to only go to sleep whilst sober - if you drink too much, this could take a while and lead to you missing vital lectures, or missing events that you really wanted to go to - such as freshers fair.
4. Alcohol is an addictive drug - A little while ago a report showed that due to it's effects, alcohol would be a banned substance if it was introduced now - it is only because we have been drinking it for thousands of years that it is not banned.
5. It's addiction can lead to serious problems - you may tout the phrase "it won't happen to me", but then I challenge you to give up drinking for a month if you say that - if you can still go out and have a good time without alcohol, then good - if not, if you are miserable without it, then you need help - it has already happened to you.
6. The health problems with alcohol are serious - you liver can shut down, and without it your body cannot cope and you need a new one. Another fact about your body and alcohol, you can only process one unit per hour - your body cannot work faster. If you drink 36 units in one night, that means that the following night, your body is still processing through the alcohol in your bloodstream.
7. Tolerance to alcohol is NOT a good thing - this only means that your brain is no longer as affected by the effects of alcohol, which means that it is used to having alcohol in your bloodstream - this means you have been drinking too much, and when you don't have alcohol, you will most likely feel worse for it - it is like when you are a regular coffee drinker - my parents now have coffee mid-late evening so that they will get to sleep - their brains are so used to the caffeine that they will pump extra serototin, a hormone to relax them, into their bloodstream - when the caffeine is taken out of the blood by the liver and kidneys, the serototin is still there and makes them tired and ready for bed - the same with alcohol, your brain will compensate by adding hormones to your bloodstream to counter the effects of alcohol - when the alcohol is removed, then you will feel the full effects of those hormones till they are too reduced - this causes an addiction, because your brain may then want the alcohol to dumb down the effects of these hormones.
8. You can have a good time without alcohol - I drink only in moderation, and I kinda know when I am starting to get a bit tipsy - so I hold back - because I know if I pass a certain threshold, my attitude will not be reserved towards my drinks and I will say "Oh what the heck!" - but every time I am out with my friends, even if I have had nothing to drink, I have an awesome time.
I wanted to make it to 10, but hopefully the reasons above are suitably good. Note that not once have I mentioned God/religious reasons - because usually for every biblical law there is good reason behind it - such as the eight above.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
whose blood runs reddest?
In The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's plays, and a piece of literature that totured me through GCSE English Literature, Portia, a beautiful woman whose fate is decided by her suitors opening different boxes, meets a moroccan gentleman who tries to wed her in accordance with this little game - a shakesperian Deal or No Deal if you were. She does not take a huge liking to the fellow, remarking at the end, after he goes home empty handed, that she hopes nobody of his "complexion" should come to her again - despite his attempts beforehand to make straight that albeit he has a different skin colour, his blood is just as red as hers.
On a recent trip to Germany, I visited Buchenwald, a former concentration camp during world war II. Having not really studied WWII in great depth before, I learnt a few things, the ignorant person that I am - it was not just Jews who were persecuted, but Homosexuals, political opponents, gypsies, and biblical scholars, to name but a few of the categories of people at the camp. The Nazi regime was about the cold, efficient method of "cleaning" the world of this so called "scum", because these people were inferior - did not uphold the ideals in Hitler's world, and had no place in mankind. One thing I noticed at the place was the memorial, a metal plate with the countries of all the people known to have died at the camp. The artist who installed it built in a special feature - the metal plate is heated to 37 degrees centigrade - Body Temperature. The idea was to unite every single nation on earth and say that we all have something in common - the Nazi Regime was purely about segregation, seperation, classification of everyone. Therefore, in stark contrast, the artist has united all those people whom the Nazis seperated and classified under our one thing. We are all Human.
Have we learnt from this? I don't think we have at all.
Under the Bush Jr Administration, for fear of terrorism, people were racially profiled because of their skin colour, and detained in guantanamo bay without trial, submitted to various methods of humiliation and torture.
We have had, in the last couple of decades, several regimes in which either white or black people were driven out of the country - in some areas of South Africa, which was liberated from the Apartheid movement, whites now cannot go because of fear of racial hatred.
In the Middle East, a war has been waging for centuries, in a "king of the hill" style battle, where two sets of forces both lay claim to one city as their "holy land". Each nation oppresses the other.
A big debate opening up in the UK is whether or not we should pull British troops out of Afghanistan, which on closer examination, is a debate as to whether or not we should save british troops but not Afghan citizens, who would fall to the taliban regime, which has already enforced the brutal elements of Sharia Law in the provinces that it controls - a law which puts women to a lower state in society, and carries brutal punishments, including death, for people who convert out of Islam, or practice homosexuality.
There is a fine line between patriotism and racism. Whose blood runs reddest in this world? Nobody's. We should not pull out of a country because we are losing one soldier per day. In both world wars, we kept on going through both of them, whilst losing thousands each day, and eventually we crushed the enemy - in WWII, we eventually crushed an enemy of the world - a powerful dictatorship to which the phrase "human rights" never even existed in their vocabularies.
I think we are all guilty. I will admit that if I see someone wearing a turban, I find it a little strange. If I see a woman wearing a full face covering, I find it a little off-ish, simply because it is out of the norm.
A Man stood up and said "I have a dream" - It is one of the most powerful and well known speeches in American History, in fact, throughout the world - Where Martin Luther King Jr stood up and gave a speech condemning racism in the USA, and stating that he wanted to see a country where white folk and black folk could talk to each other. Where white kids and black kids could play with each other without fear of retribution. He had a dream about desegregation of the races.
I have a dream, too. I have a dream that one day, our cities will not be made up of ghettos where "the black people live" or "the asian people live". I have a dream that one day, should we get caught up in battle, the safety of our troops will not take precedence over the safety of the citizen's whose rights we are fighting for. I have a dream that that is all that we will fight for. I have a dream, that one day, nation will stop rising up against nation over battles of wills, territory, religion or politics. I have a dream, that I will be able to walk down the street and not find it strange to see someone wearing a turban, because it will be normal to see someone, such is the integration that we would have produced. I have a dream that we do not need to worry about absurd political correctness, because we are educated enough to know what can be said and what can't. I have a dream that this does not stretch to racism, but also to homophobia, sexism, ageism, persecution against someone's religion, disability, or physical appearance. I have a dream, that one day, the world would be one.
On a recent trip to Germany, I visited Buchenwald, a former concentration camp during world war II. Having not really studied WWII in great depth before, I learnt a few things, the ignorant person that I am - it was not just Jews who were persecuted, but Homosexuals, political opponents, gypsies, and biblical scholars, to name but a few of the categories of people at the camp. The Nazi regime was about the cold, efficient method of "cleaning" the world of this so called "scum", because these people were inferior - did not uphold the ideals in Hitler's world, and had no place in mankind. One thing I noticed at the place was the memorial, a metal plate with the countries of all the people known to have died at the camp. The artist who installed it built in a special feature - the metal plate is heated to 37 degrees centigrade - Body Temperature. The idea was to unite every single nation on earth and say that we all have something in common - the Nazi Regime was purely about segregation, seperation, classification of everyone. Therefore, in stark contrast, the artist has united all those people whom the Nazis seperated and classified under our one thing. We are all Human.
Have we learnt from this? I don't think we have at all.
Under the Bush Jr Administration, for fear of terrorism, people were racially profiled because of their skin colour, and detained in guantanamo bay without trial, submitted to various methods of humiliation and torture.
We have had, in the last couple of decades, several regimes in which either white or black people were driven out of the country - in some areas of South Africa, which was liberated from the Apartheid movement, whites now cannot go because of fear of racial hatred.
In the Middle East, a war has been waging for centuries, in a "king of the hill" style battle, where two sets of forces both lay claim to one city as their "holy land". Each nation oppresses the other.
A big debate opening up in the UK is whether or not we should pull British troops out of Afghanistan, which on closer examination, is a debate as to whether or not we should save british troops but not Afghan citizens, who would fall to the taliban regime, which has already enforced the brutal elements of Sharia Law in the provinces that it controls - a law which puts women to a lower state in society, and carries brutal punishments, including death, for people who convert out of Islam, or practice homosexuality.
There is a fine line between patriotism and racism. Whose blood runs reddest in this world? Nobody's. We should not pull out of a country because we are losing one soldier per day. In both world wars, we kept on going through both of them, whilst losing thousands each day, and eventually we crushed the enemy - in WWII, we eventually crushed an enemy of the world - a powerful dictatorship to which the phrase "human rights" never even existed in their vocabularies.
I think we are all guilty. I will admit that if I see someone wearing a turban, I find it a little strange. If I see a woman wearing a full face covering, I find it a little off-ish, simply because it is out of the norm.
A Man stood up and said "I have a dream" - It is one of the most powerful and well known speeches in American History, in fact, throughout the world - Where Martin Luther King Jr stood up and gave a speech condemning racism in the USA, and stating that he wanted to see a country where white folk and black folk could talk to each other. Where white kids and black kids could play with each other without fear of retribution. He had a dream about desegregation of the races.
I have a dream, too. I have a dream that one day, our cities will not be made up of ghettos where "the black people live" or "the asian people live". I have a dream that one day, should we get caught up in battle, the safety of our troops will not take precedence over the safety of the citizen's whose rights we are fighting for. I have a dream that that is all that we will fight for. I have a dream, that one day, nation will stop rising up against nation over battles of wills, territory, religion or politics. I have a dream, that I will be able to walk down the street and not find it strange to see someone wearing a turban, because it will be normal to see someone, such is the integration that we would have produced. I have a dream that we do not need to worry about absurd political correctness, because we are educated enough to know what can be said and what can't. I have a dream that this does not stretch to racism, but also to homophobia, sexism, ageism, persecution against someone's religion, disability, or physical appearance. I have a dream, that one day, the world would be one.
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