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The Newspaper of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Pride dances through Europe, missing a metropolis
Stranger Sounds
By Shataya Pride
Overseas Correspondent
We Americans are a “proper” clever bunch. I say this because during my Introduction to Fiction & Poetry class one of the students, who by our standards would be non-trad, blatantly stated that American spellings were wrong and that they bothered her.
I proceeded to defend us by stating that we come from different countries and have different ways of doing things. I also told her that her statement was the equivalent of someone saying that someone who wore a burka was wrong. Would that person with the burka be wrong or would the person stating that be wrong? It got silent after my argument was presented.
My “tutor” proceeded to say that the Americans had shut them up. Score!These past two weeks have been pretty low-key. I’ve just been trying to do my assignments and make it to my 9 and 10 a.m. classes on time. I don’t know who thought that it was a funny prank to play by giving me classes so early, but I’m not okay with this joke. I haven’t taken classes this early since freshman year and if I knew that I would have had to do that here, I would’ve cried and gotten out of it.
Things here are very similar to North Adams (as I have stated before) but also very different. Although both are small towns that shut down pretty early, Ormskirk has a market on Thursdays and Saturdays (that I have failed to see yet) and so many side streets that lead to other places.
To walk down Church Street or Ashland is almost second nature to me now. The feeling of isolation, the feeling that it is just the air and I, is a feeling that I have not attained here. In some ways, I still feel like a big city girl in a small place, but in other ways I feel like I’m being swallowed whole by something that I can’t see. Maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time in my room, maybe it’s because I don’t party a lot or maybe it’s because the town shuts down really early. Honestly though, I don’t think it’s any of those things. I think it’s my need for city life. I yearn for things that are open later than 5:30 p.m.
I yearn for transportation to continue to and from school past 5:40 p.m. I yearn for bright lights and action and I got a taste of that this weekend.My calves still hurt honestly. A couple of friends and I went to Liverpool to party for my friend’s birthday (she is a leap year baby). We started off at a place called Krazy House which was far from that. In actuality it was pretty dead. It had the potential to be great. The first floor had a live band, the second floor had 80’s music, and the third floor, I’m not so sure what they were playing, but they had fog. We left that club and went to another one named Zoo.
It was just that. I pretty much danced until my asthma told me to sit down and I didn’t get back to my room until 6 a.m. It was so worth it. I was able to let loose, laugh, sweat away stress, and make memories that will forever be embedded in my mind. I also got a great work out, so I can’t complain.
My only complaint is that the bouncers in McDonalds (yes, bouncers) made us leave as soon as we got our food.It’s scary to realize that my time is flying by. I have two months left here before I head back to the States. This weekend I’m going to Dublin, Ireland, and in a few more weeks I will be heading out for my three week Spring Break. It’s bittersweet. I guess all I can do for the next few weeks is live it up – European style.
Bizarre sights and sounds trigger students' imaginations
By Cody Romano
Features Editor
At 10 years old, Kristen Rubano crawled into her mother's dim closet. She scribbled on papers in her lap, sometimes keeping an overhead light off to remain hidden. At first Kristen chronicled the raw emotions inspired by her father's battle with multiple sclerosis.
But as she kept writing, she began to weave her feelings into works of fiction. "I twisted stories to be ambiguous," said Rubano. "I would change setting and situation but keep raw emotions." By the time her father recovered, Kristen was thinking like a storyteller.
The panoramic window in her Berkshire Towers suite overlooks most of MCLA. Five stories above campus, the junior applies her double-major in English and Psychology to the universal past-time of "people watching." She imagines the thoughts and feelings of unfamiliar characters carrying books to class. "It's something I do without thinking," she said.
"It feeds my interests as a writer and potential psychologist."Inventing stories about strangers can ease loneliness and help people feel in control of their lives, said Dr. Sharon Claffey, a social psychology professor at MCLA. People-watching is a lot like watching TV, she said, except that the storyline stems from the observer’s imagination.College students often live together in clustered dorms.
Separated by thin walls and windows, they sometimes create stories to explain bizarre sights and sounds on campus. Alex Nichipor, a sophomore, says she was falling asleep in her dorm room last year when she noticed groaning coming from outside her door. At first she suspected that someone had smuggled a dog into Hoosac Hall, but as the noise grew louder and more labored, she distinguished the sounds of people shifting and a man grunting with exhaustion.
Finally, she swung open her door and found two shirtless men wrestling on the tile-floor of her hallway.While some create stories to explain strangers' behavior, others invent narratives just for fun. To entertain herself as she waited in an airport terminal, junior Ashley Franco speculated about a woman who looked miserable. She wondered if the woman had suffered a rough childhood or if she was returning from vacation."It was fun," said Franco. "What else are you going to do in an airport?"How accurate are our hypotheses about strangers?
Most people attribute too much of strangers’ behavior to their personalities and not enough to the situation, said Dr. Claffey. She argues that the situation of being in an airport may be enough to make a generally happy person look miserable. Yet some storytellers let their imagination run wild with little regard for realism. Nalaja Caesar, a freshman, is Rubano's neighbor and shares her passion for creative storytelling.
She heard people screaming through the walls of her room last semester and imagined that monsters with foaming mouths were overrunning North Adams. She gleans inspiration for many of her stories by imagining what MCLA students were like when they lived at home. Everyone at MCLA has a different story, she said.
