April Ruminations

1) The Lawrence police pulled me over again yesterday. My unlawful violation: failure to properly signal a turn... Really? I wasn’t even aware this was a ticketable offense anymore. Thankfully the officer decided to follow me all the way from 19th & Haskell until I turned into my driveway until he decided to turn his lights on and harass me; which pretty much meant that I could go directly from car to fridge to dull the ridiculous cop-hating rage I was consumed in instead of having to drive any significant distance in said ridiculous rage.

In my past four years in Lawrence I have been pulled over/harassed for: running a stop sign on a bicycle (x2), speeding on a bicycle, riding a bicycle on a sidewalk, spinning my tires on a sandy left hand uphill turn, jaywalking.

Rinse and repeat the following list times three and you basically have my life since the minute I turned 15. I really hate the state of Kansas’ law enforcement agencies and really wish there was more legitimate crime for them to stop so they could stop heckling kids.


2) I read the most amazing article in the Times this weekend and think everyone else should too. The part that hit closest to home for me was the complete and total lack of academic communication between different departments in major universities. There is literally nothing I disagree with in this article, which rarely if ever happens (yes, even in the NYT).

After what I consider a rather diverse background in the school of liberal arts here at the University I have to whole-heartedly agree that if we had a more problem-based curriculum and department programming we could be breeding some absolutely brilliant solutions for the future. Instead we have kids like me. Kids who have such a large base of liberal arts knowledge that we can basically vomit the likes of Hooks, Freire, Freud, Aristotle, gender theory, and the entire canon of 20th century socialist thought on demand; because that’s what they teach in EVERY department on campus. And those things are all great. I really would not be the person I am today if I didn’t appreciate those things, but honestly I don’t need to learn about them in every class I take; discuss and partition out what sect of theory each belongs to and stick to that, please.

3) Friday night I hung out with four of my friends from separate time periods of my life. Garrison (my best friend from elementary until high school), Austin (my roommate sophomore year), Jeff (who has spent way too much time at a bar with me in the last year) and David (the new guard of KU Cycling). This was absolutely mind-blowing to me because my friend circle has done more than a few complete 180s in the past 10 years and the cat I still identified most with was my oldest buddy Garrison. By this point I’m fully aware that life as a human being is full of shared experiences/emotions/actions but it is scary that I see this cat maybe twice a year and we still ride that same parallel line that we have been for the past 15 years.

So here’s to the ass-hats that protect and serve the city of Lawrence, the op-ed section of the times and still being able to rally old friends for a night out in Lawrence.