Ivy Schools

I have yet to see a show or movie about what life is like in an Ivy League school. There are plenty about what it takes to get in there. The underprivileged inner-city student that manages to overcome the odds and get into Harvard. The uniformed boarding school kid learning some incredibly valuable life lesson, writing an essay about it, deemed worthy of admittance into the elite. But I have yet to come across anything, anything at all that talks about life once you get in.

What is it like to go from the top of your class to the bottom, or middle? What is it like to have people who would otherwise never look at you twice randomly offer you a job? What is it like to have people tell stories about you? To be one of the connections that people brag about? I am used to being invisible; this is so disorienting.

I wish that I could be like Will Hunting before he was “discovered”. Just live life. Study at a library. Be yourself without any responsibilities to anyone else. Once you reveal what you are capable of, people start expecting it of you. Then again, if nobody expects it of you, you have fewer opportunities to explore with it. Well, I certainly will not have any problems with that.

I think that maybe people do not like to listen to something that they do not understand. A lot of times, they do not even like having it around. Why do people get so emotional when someone is speaking in a language that they do not understand? Is it really national pride, or is it because they like to know what is going on all the time? Is it bad to want to know what is going on all the time? That is considered one of the nobler pursuits of science and history and journalism and philosophy… maybe it is only bad if it involves stamping out what you do not know instead of trying to understand it. Nobody has tried to stamp out institutions like Harvard, except the communists.

I guess that my dilemma is simply that I do not know what I have gotten myself into. I have no idea what the next your years of my life will be. I am not sure that I am going to be prepared for change that is beyond my control, beyond my understanding, to have consequences that I cannot predict. Can I predict them? Well, I will certainly do my best.

Feminism

On the day that I realized that I was a feminist, I had opened a church door for a man. I thought that I was just being polite, but he had no idea how to react. He could not, of course, walk through the door opened by a woman. Instead he stood there, looking at me, horrified. He looked at the handle, his hands itching to take it so that he would be in his rightful position, holding the door as I walked through it, but the handle was too firmly in my grasp. He looked at me, at the door, and back at me, pleading with me to solve this horrible paradox. I could not expect him to commit the sin of walking through a door held by a woman. I had effectively blocked the door by trying to open it for him. I put him out of his misery and walked through it.

This was the first time that I experienced open sexism. I cannot hold it against this man that he was religiously polite and respectful to women. However, it made me realize that my fundamentalist church is different from school. At school, I get kind of annoyed by feminists, trying to eradicate the discrimination that is not there, finding bias in the entomology of words and then refusing to use them, guilting everyone with a Y chromosome because of the sins of history and far-off countries. I never realized that sexism could actually affect me.

I started paying more attention. I had never realized that my mother, the first female doctor in my denomination, had faced anything but friendliness. I started hearing conversations and implications that she had stepped out of her place. They were rare, granted, but they were there, most of the time coming out of the mouths of other women. I actually listened during the mother's day sermon, and the minister's extravagant praise of the housewife. It reminded me of the praise given to a three-year-old's finger painting. I listened at the weddings, where they made the wife's vows include submission to her husband. I hated it. So many people at my church honestly believe that the "fairer sex" is the weaker sex.

I set out to prove them wrong. I did not have heated debates; I just provided myself as a counterexample to their over-generalized rules. I went to school and got A's. I succeeded in math and science. I argued philosophy and religion, refusing to sit back and watch. I played sports, and I scored goals. I smashed my own bugs. I searched for thrills. Nobody will call me weak. I have done everything I can to force people to put away their prejudices.

Although feminists annoy me, I am one. I am not going to "follow my destiny" as a housewife. I am not going to be defined by my breasts. Instead, I will break every stereotype that I can, and I will be free to do anything.

Student of Integrity Essays

Recently, I just wrote an essay for the “Student of Integrity” award. That was probably the most difficult essay that I have ever had to write, even though it was only 300 words. How, exactly, do they expect me to sum up my entire philosophy of life in a single page? Not only that, but like any other college essay, I had the responsibility to make it look like I was perfect. That was hard with the academic ones, but trying to do that when I am supposed to be demonstrating my integrity???? Impossible. Anyway, I thought and thought, and by the time the due date was near, and the office wanted to get it sent out, I just wrote what I thought. I knew this essay was going to get me in trouble, but I did it any way.

I do not think that I deserve a Student of Integrity award. The people at school who nominated me for this think that I am more virtuous than I am because I do my best to be polite. I follow rules. I do not do either of the above because I have a particular affinity for rules or politesse, I just do not have the energy to fight it.
I grew up with a mentally handicapped brother who had violent tendencies and absolutely no idea how to control them. If he wanted something, then he would go for it with all of his might. If I wanted the opposite, then I would have to fight with all of mine. This means that I had to learn very early on how to prioritize what I fight for. I am not going to risk bruising in order to watch Arthur as opposed to Star Trek, but I might be willing to fight for an episode of Sabrina for which I have been waiting an entire week. I was bombarded with these priority conflicts for my entire childhood.
From these experiences, I have learned how to distribute my effort. My school has a particularly strict dress code that I do not particularly care about. However, many teachers notice that I follow it fairly well. It is not because I have any underlying belief in the sanctity of rules. I just do not particularly care, so I am not going to cause conflict over something as silly as tucking in a shirt.
I am not a virtuous person. I do not care about rules. I do not go through the conflict of breaking them, but I do not go out of my way to make sure that they are never broken.

That essay was completely true. However, the college counselor still did not like it, understandably. It went against everything that he has been trained to do for his entire career, gloss things over, make students look perfect. Here I was, butchering my image for a scholarship. He was having a hard time controlling his temper.
Anyway, I rewrote the essay, trying to make myself look a little better and appease the counselor:

What is this essay? Am I supposed to tell the committee how virtuous I am? How I am better than all of the other applicants? I cannot do that. I just do my best to follow what I believe. That trait sometimes this gets me into trouble.
The most prominent time this has happened was when I asked for my membership to the ACC to be removed. I did this for a number of reasons. Mainly, it was because I did not like pretending to believe one thing while doing another. I did not like pretending to wear a head covering and a skirt all the time, even though I only wore them on Sunday, even though this is the inconsistent practice of the vast majority of female ACC members. I did not like nodding my head, pretending to agree with all ultra-conservative positions. I did not like pretending that I did not play sports. I did not like pretending that I intended to become a housewife. So I stopped pretending, and asked for my membership to be removed.
There are a lot of people who disagree with my action. They tell me that many members play sports and vote democratically and wear jewelry. One should not talk about those things in church, but those liberal views do not warrant leaving. I should go with the flow and not cause discord. But I was tired of hiding who I was, smiling and nodding and grinding my teeth. So, I did the only thing that I could think of. I gave up my membership. I broke my uninformed, sixth-grade oath, but I was true to myself and to my beliefs. I do not know if that was ethical or not, but what I did was my best guess at morality.

It was still not good. Too controversial. That was what the High School Director said. So I rewrote it again. He told me that I was thinking too much in terms of obeying rules. He said that in his experience directing the Honor Committee, of which I am a member, he has noticed that I do, in fact, try to do the right thing. I should write my essay about that. I went to the art room computers and typed up this silly thing.

A lot of people think that having integrity means following rules and doing what you are told. Rules have their place, but they are not the things that make a person moral. Instead, it is the type of decisions that someone makes when there are no rules to follow.
Sometimes, that means looking beyond an immediate situation to the purpose of it. If someone asks a question on a moral dilemma the purpose is not providing a confidant response, but a solution the questioner is willing to follow. If she is asking about homework, the purpose is not to provide the answer, but to provide understanding. Understanding the purpose of a situation effects the attitude with which you approach it.
Another important attribute is the willingness to sacrifice time, effort, and money for the greater good. I could be selfish with my study time so that I can get the best scores possible. However, I often prefer to help friends who are struggling in that class. That is a small price to pay for their success, the ensuing relationship, and the success of the class as a whole.
Self-sacrifice and patience are nothing if it is done in the wrong spirit. I do not do things because I want to be better than other people. I do them because I want the people around me to succeed. I want them to help me when I fall short of an ideal. I sin. I fail. However, because I do not look down on my fellow sinners and failures, those faults are kept to a minimum.

I know that it is not well organized, but I just wrote it out because I was too emotionally strained. It is hard when the office thinks that I am trying to sabotage myself, trying to annoy them, trying to make them mad. All on a paper over integrity. Frustration!
Anyway, they accepted it, and sent it in. I do not know if it will actually win anything, but I can hope. I do not know if they accepted it just because they were tired of fighting, or if it actually has some sort of quality about it. I did not stick to any sort of thesis statement. Oh well. I will just hope for the money and be glad that I do not have to fight with the office any more.

Relations with the Church

When I lost my temper for the second time in my life, I was dealing with my very strict, very unique church. It all started with a moral dilemma I was experiencing. My brother had just lost his membership in the church because he had joined the army, something that our pacifism forbade. I was having a hard time supporting the Church’s judgement because I love my brother, and because the logic behind the tenant was not clear. It is based of the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” War implies killing. Therefore war is against the Ten Commandments. However, King David, one of the most revered Biblical figures, went to war many times, and is not considered a sinner because of that. Something seemed inconsistent.

These were my honest thoughts, but I did not want to rebel from the Church. It was possible that I was wrong. I wrote an e-mail to the Elder, Phil, asking him to present a counter-argument so that my faith in the church would remain intact. That never happened. The response I received completely ignored my question, and instead included veiled hints that I was starting down a path of sin. Phil told me that it was possible to question any aspect of the church, but that they were still “basic Biblical truths of scripture.” As examples, he listed tenants of this unique church that have the least Biblical support: literally kneeling in prayer, never wearing any jewelry, and never dating.

That response got me hopping mad. I could barely think straight. Not only did he ignore my question, not only did he generically accuse me of sin without a real basis, he was saying completely untrue things as if they were straight from the mouth of God. My church’s custom of marriage without a dating period has almost no biblical support! I paced. I screamed. Finally, I wrote a furious e-mail, pointing out his blatantly wrong logic and ranting on, using as many biting Biblical references as I could, using no self-restraint to avoid offence. Later, I had to apologize for my disrespect to the highest position in the church, but I do not regret my outburst.

Since then, I have never been able to trust the pulpit as I once did. I do not hate it. I simply do not trust it. I know that the church is not God. For four years, I silently disobeyed any rules which I did not believe until, early in my senior year, I finally made the decision to withdraw my membership. After a summer of participation in social events meant to replace the dating system, after four years of listening to the sermons in church, refusing to let my blood boil, I revealed my beliefs to my parents. Now I know that, even under incompetent, uncompromising authority that nobody has the courage to challenge openly, my decisions and my beliefs are my own, and I will not be frightened into changing them.