So unfortunately this semester will not be my last as I immediately got overwhelmed by the work and had to drop my Spanish class. Because this made me take out another semester I decided to drop my political science class too. I enrolled in winter classes, my Spanish class was not available for some reason so I enrolled in the next level of creative writing and chose a political science class with the same professor as I do like how he formats the class. I just hope next year, whenever I can, I can do my upgrading courses for math and physics so I can apply to med school once I learn Spanish properly, although apparently they also teach you? Regardless, I need to accumulate funds too. Anyway, let’s move on to the week.

Sociology: most of this week was actually just talking about research methods but the last class of the week was very interesting. The first 20 minutes was spent talking about the US’s speech at the UN. All that will be stated here is all said by my professor: Trump stated that he was thinking about initiating Iran and doing it quickly, so he threatened genocide and a nuclear attack. Both are violations of international law. The west is openly acting in fascistic ways. Imagine if Russian or Chinese officials said this, everyone would freak out, our media would be on it immediately, but when the empire does it then it’s fine. This is Media Imperialism!

Media imperialism approves of American imperialism and demonizes anyone that opposes it, like China and Russia. The Global North perpetuates genocide and war but are excused! This is why the Conflict framework is so important because it is a threat, because it is a threat that means the media and elites attack this form of analysis. A student points out the xenophobia of the lack of care towards those that are being threatened with nukes.

It is not an expression of the people, it is an expression of western elites, there is no democracy, they are unaccountable to the people. Western elites are in a panic because the Global South is rising to create a multipolar world. The West is pushing more overt fascism to stop this rise. People in the West/US need to rise up against this. A student said that we’d be ignored because we are not of the elite. My professor said that more people need to care and get organized, they need to use their numbers. We will not be rescued by elites, protests/movements can have push back but you just need enough. Look at the history of revolutions and social movements, the early stages always seemed hopeless but they succeeded in the end.

The mask has come off, it is not about noble goals of “spreading democracy,” it is something else. It is fun to kill people. This is an opportunity to recruit for social movements.

Then another student pipes up, and she talks quite a bit in class. My view is that she is quite anti-Russia and Iran. She states “people lost their freedom in Iran, the women!” My professor counters that the Shah (spelling?) was installed by the West, Iranians lost their freedoms because of the West, you can have your criticisms about the regime but at the end of the day a bomb is not going to help the women there. Imperialism is not about spreading freedom, it is about extracting resources.

The rest of class we talked about commercial advertising and promotional culture and how they serve elite interests.

Creative Writing: This class may seem uninteresting but considering the weird anti-communist shit I have heard, it has been relevant to write about. We all finished our short stories and this week we started our critiques. For every day that we have class we have to critique a bundle of stories at home, and then bring the scribbled on hard copies to class. We then talk about the stories and hand the hard copies to the author. All of us were numbered, so those numbered 1-4 were critiqued on Wednesday, and those 5-8 were critiqued on Friday, make sense? I was supposed to be number one but because of my ADHD and scheduling conflicts I was made to be number 11, which means my story gets critiqued next Friday (Wednesday is a holiday).

How we critique is based on this: first we summarize the story, then we say what we liked about it, then we critique it (what needs to be worked on). I actually love reading my fellow students’ works and scribbling all over them. I enjoy pointing out what I like and what could be changed, it feels nice to be helpful to someone. I also realized through this process that it is much harder to give positive comments than criticism. It is so much easier to point out what is wrong, it takes more effort to say what is good and WHY it is good. I took my time on each story I had and tried my best to give the best feedback I could. One of the stories was VERY rough and thus took much longer to comment on, because as a whole it unfortunately needs a writing overhaul. But I still did it because it is important to point out what one does not need to worry about. One of my classmates is terrible at this.

He is actually a guy that was in my East Asian Politics class a few semesters ago! If you remember me complaining about an annoying guy in that class, it’s this same fucking person. He is still annoying, especially when critiquing others. He seems to revel in giving negative critique as if his shit doesn’t stink. When he gives “compliments” he is never specific enough and actually got into an argument with the professor! My professor told him that the word “flows” means nothing and that he needs to be more specific. The student argued that flows does mean something and that he meant the conversation was natural, professor argued that he should’ve said “naturally” then because that means something more than “flows.” The student kept arguing, and it got to a point where my professor just straight up said “I have a PhD in literature.”

The girl next to me was quietly cheering this on because she was frustrated with that student and how much he dug into other students. She straight up told me she was scared of his feedback. I told her to ignore him and that her story was safe with me because I am good with this stuff. She was critiqued on Friday.

On Wednesday, our first critique, this guy just wanted to point out all the flaws of the stories rather than recognizing the good. We do this, not to coddle the author, but to ensure that editing is focused and to not beat them into being unmotivated. I am sure editors in the industry are a lot harsher, but this is a classroom and an intro class. One of the students used ”dolefully” in his story, I liked this description, but Mr. Big Head thought it was “too emotional.” He proceeded to do this constantly with every story, nothing was good enough for him. Which is strange because when I went home to read and critique the next batch of stories, his was on there and that shit was VERY boring.

Anyway, Friday was when anti-communist shit was spewed but in a very subtle way. We read the next few stories ahead of time and arrived with our critiques. The annoying guy went last and while people were gassing his details/descriptions up like crazy, in the end we all agreed that there was no story. The short story that brought up anti-communism was about a stalker ex-boyfriend who kept sending vintage holiday postcards to his ex-girlfriend (the protagonist). Why did this illicit anti-communist comments? Because when my professor was talking about upping the stakes with the cards, he said that the boyfriend could send a card from the KGB museum in Latvia, thats scary and changes the tone to something much darker! Then there were jokes about the ex being a KGB/Russian spy… yeah that was exhausting to listen to.

Anyway, that was week three. Hope you enjoyed this one, I am aware that it is weirdly formatted. Can’t wait for my story to get critiqued, I am not happy but I am also not scared either, maybe it hasn’t hit me yet. We’ll see if anyone actually did their reserach and figured out what the Portuguese words and references were. Lots about the Carnation revolution.