The Wake

You know what I love?
The book The Little Prince.
Multi-vitamins.
Big, rainy storms.
Cupcakes.
Yahtzee.Oh, and I sure love sucking cock. Well, I prefer to receive, but it was a good way to start, eh?Finals are the joyous time of year when you have to finally begin to read your books and store information, however, rarely are we allowed to learn about things that are really important, like the history of oral sex. So, for all your carpet munching and dong dining needs, let me teach you something you’ll really enjoy.Oral sex has been considered deviant behavior for centuries. Justifications for this prejudice include complaint that it wastes precious man-seed and is unclean and unhygienic. Much of the dislike of oral sex also arises from bias against homosexuals and homosexual practices. …

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Democracy, in its most basic definition, means the rule of the people. However, American historians have neglected any information that would contradict democracy in America. Slavery undermined democracy in America until the Civil War. Jim Crow laws and “separate but equal” remained in America until the Civil Rights movement. The absence of workers’ rights until President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal isn’t taught in schools. The U.S. government did not allow women’s suffrage until the 19th amendment. The list goes on. African-American’s rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights still have to be fought for—they are not a guarantee. In the past 50 years, many fights joined them: immigrants’ rights, students’ rights, religious rights, homosexuals’ rights, environmental rights and the rights of every non-white minority living in the United States. None of these groups have been or …

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Like many people, I started smoking because my friends did. I was 16. I started out as a social smoker, but then it became my choice form of stress-relief. A cigarette was my accessory, my excuse and one of my favorite pastimes. In spite of warnings from my mother, who is an oncologist, I smoked daily for three years. I got two tobacco tickets before I turned 18, but I still just couldn’t believe smoking was that bad. I was the lone smoker outside of lecture halls in sub-zero temperatures, which definitely wasn’t social smoking. Nothing was a good enough reason for me to quit until about a month and a half ago. I came home from class on a chilly Tuesday and decided to go for a run. For as long as I had …

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We all remember our first semester freshman year. We fled to our dorm rooms every chance we got (but still managed to never speak to our roommate who was ALWAYS THERE) and avoided as much human contact as possible. We had no friends at ALL, except the kids from our high school we clung to in the first couple weeks. We were desperate, we were lonely and we were pathetic. Right? … Right?Well, I was. I thought I’d never have friends again. The future was a bleak black hole of despair and woe, where I would sit looking up at all those oh-so-fortunate personable freshman, who relied on the “personality” and “wit” to win people over. Like those even mean anything!And so I remained in the black pit. I was so depressed and lonesome that …

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Hi, My Name is _____________.If we have to have numbers, I claim 62. Recently, in my political science course, I got schooled in U of M privacy policy. In the classroom we regularly sign an attendance sheet. The sheet, which is passed from one student to another around the classroom, contains the first and last names of everyone in the class and apparently, is an infringement of our rights. By letting the other students know our names we are putting ourselves on the line to be victims of stalking, online predation or any other of a list of possible crimes. Following this rule, it is not okay for a professor to call any student by their full name, or, for example, Janet one day and Ms. Jackson (if the professor is nasty) the other.We had …

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Growing up in the southwest corner of Minnesota left me unexposed to lentils and bitter yogurt—I ate “hot-dish,” which is anything but exotic. The people in my hometown were mostly white and Lutheran. That’s not to say I wasn’t exposed to other cultures. Nobles County, the next county to the south of my farm, has 11 percent of Minnesota’s growing Hispanic population. They were drawn to the area by the now closed Campbell’s soup plant. Still, I had never been confronted with more cultural differences than when my college roommate, Ashama, turned out to be from India. Our lifestyles clashed like curry and cows’ milk, yet our differences eventually faded as we got to know one another.
We were thrown together by need, as is usually the case in college. I was subletting …

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When viewed from above at night, North Korea is a black space in the highly lit and populated Asian continent. The majority of North Koreans—the workers and peasants—live in a Government immersed in figurative and literal darkness.Whenever discussing his war on terror, President Bush names North Korea as an axis of evil. He paints the country as an outdated relict of the Cold War—an oppressive communist state that starves its people. Additionally, the Western world suspects and claims that North Korea’s government has nuclear weapons of mass destruction. This is the only information most Americans have on the struggling country. Consequently, North Korea is the enemy.But should Americans only view North Koreans as a foe?North Korea’s communist government is known as the Korean’s Workers Party. The organization’s philosophy is juche, which is based in self-reliance. …

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I was disgusted, although not surprised, to read the reactionary comments from Sam Brownback, a senator from my home state of Kansas, in the March 20 edition of Newsweek about South Dakota’s ban on abortions, as well as those of several other politicians (both pro-life and pro-choice). I was surprised at the noticeable absence from the article of a quote from a woman. Any woman at all. As with any other scientific investigation, the next step was to check Google to further examine what I considered this great injustice. In the first 15 hits on Google news under the search “abortion” only one woman, who has not had an abortion, mind you, is quoted. On Google images, under the same search, the first 40 pictures contain five women: one blurry, undefined figure under the title …

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Staring through the musty air at my favorite dive bar, tucked away at a small table in the darkest corner I saw a nicely-dressed man, sporting a pale blue button-down shirt, sitting next to a woman, hair coiffed carefully into a sloppy bun, wearing enough makeup to feign drag-queen status. They smiled a lot, chuckled awkwardly during conversation and frequently spent time silently staring into the distance both wearing expressions of horror and duress. A first date. They struggled for a while longer, maintaining conversation, looking as though they were choking back the urge to vomit, but still putting all of their energy into this date. I was mentally cheering them along, confident in the potential for success. Then, he blew it. I saw the slow prelude: his neck muscles tensed, his eyes began to …

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Growing up in a small town does interesting things to a person. Small towners are a different breed. It is especially obvious in the years following high school. I came from a town in northern Minnesota of 900 people and graduated from a class of 80. After attending one of the largest universities in the nation and living in a major city, I realized how different my fellow townies and I compare to your average college student. First of all, in a small-town high school cliques don’t really develop like in other places. Of course you have your different groups, but there aren’t enough kids to have defined cliques. And often you have gone to school with many of your classmates since elementary school. Due to this, small town teens’ identities are less defined. I …

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Most people have heard the encouraging expression “count your blessings.” Well, for me, my number one blessing is my Grandma Barthel. With all due respect to my other grandmother, grandma Ceil, Cecilia Jeannette Barthel, is a blessing who’s been of great inspiration to me in innumerable measures.My college years have extended far beyond the timely ideal and financially appealing four-year-graduation plan. What began in 1998 at Bethel College in St. Paul will soon come to an end here at the U. And, while I cherish the many opportunities, experiences and memories these years have afforded me, I’ve definitely had several rough times as well. Throughout these times—both good and bad—there’s been one constant source of emotional support besides my mom—and that’s Grandma Barthel. With her simplistic appreciation for life and her family, Grandma B has …

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In developing American society, around the emancipation of the slaves, there was a movement in popular entertainment to further oppress African Americans: blackface. The form of entertainment initially put burnt-cork makeup on a white performer to make him look black. Then, towards the turn of the twentieth century, even black performers themselves would put on blackface. A performer in blackface depicted African-American culture as disorganized, lustful, ignorant, savage and inferior to whites. Ultimately, the blackface image (along with Jim Crow, Plessey vs. Fergusson and the government forced end to Reconstruction) managed to repress the progression of the African-American race in the U.S. following the Civil War. Furthermore, the presence of blackface is still prevalent in contemporary American popular culture. Though faces are no longer being painted, stereotypes are still being exploited and profited on. However, …

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I’ve always thought that eventually the ugly would inherit the Earth. It seems logical that the less attractive people wouldn’t be so plagued with social obligations and would spend their time studying. The studying would make the ugly smart. Freakishly smart. Inevitably, in my mind, the new nerds would become consumed with anger at the successful, yet stupid, sexy people in high profile positions. The unbeautiful would then develop robots to kill the beautiful people. There would be a bloody battle of machine versus (wo)man. The robots would obviously win. And we would all live happily ever after. Well, most of us would live happily ever after.The thing is, I’m apparently wrong. Study after study has proven that the sexy folk are not just sexy, but successful beyond their ability to get booty, and likely …

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In the past few weeks we all have heard of and possibly seen a series of cartoons published by the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten. The set of 12 cartoons, depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in various scenes was published by the paper on Sept. 30, 2005, after a Danish author complained he could not find an illustrator for his children’s book about the Prophet.The Copenhagen Post wrote: “Jyllands-Posten called for and printed the cartoons by various Danish illustrators, after reports that artists were refusing to illustrate works about Islam, out of fear of fundamentalist retribution. The newspaper said it printed the cartoons as a test of whether Muslim fundamentalists had begun affecting the freedom of expression in Denmark.” Upon viewing them, I found at least four of the cartoons to be overtly offensive towards Muslims (or …

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It has been fifteen years since the United States’ government has seriously discussed illiteracy in America. President George W. Bush’s recent “No Child Left Behind” campaign hinted at the issue, but turned out to be merely a slogan to gain votes instead of a solution to help Americans. It was in fact during George H.W. Bush’s administration in the early 1990s that modern America was introduced to its startling illiteracy problem. In 1991, Congress passed the National Literacy Act to put an end to illiteracy in America. The bill states that “[in 1991] nearly 30,000,000 adults in the United States have serious problems with literacy.” Over ten years later in 2003, The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) did an extensive survey of American literacy rates. The findings, which were finally released in December of …

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