This past Saturday, we were finally able to pull off perhaps the biggest student-club run event on campus.

In case the title was too subtle, I speak of course, of the SAS Culture Show.

We as a club had been building up to this moment for so long that for a while, it felt that that’s all we were responsible for doing; making sure the Culture Show went smoothly.

(Which, thank the heavens, it did.)

We had such an amazing line up of performers all of whom, save for one team, were students from Bryn Mawr itself.

Bhangra, fusion, Bollywood, bharatanatyam, everything.

And those are just the dances.

I know I haven’t put up any real pictures of the Culture Show itself yet, BUT that’s because we’re still waiting on our photographer to edit and finalize them.

Yes. We are cool enough to have a dedicated photographer for the show.

I had an image in my head of people who went to edgy art performances on weekend nights.

They were these cool, bohemian, worldly types who’d seen all of Beckett’s plays.  Who actually knew what Beckett’s plays were about to begin with.

This Friday when a friend and I braved our way to Goodhart (we almost didn’t go because of the cold), a very different audience awaited us.

So many of the people occupying the seats in the theatre were suburban parents, old couples wearing block colors and wind breakers. It was incredibly endearing for some reason.

It was with this audience that I saw all those edgy performances that night. A monologue about how the sky never dims anymore and you can’t see the stars, a dance video inspired by an artist who I mistook for the guy who illustrated the Roald Dahl books.

When I was a kid, I decided I would never say time flies fast.

Because it essentially meant that I, as a person, was unable to appreciate all that was happening around me. And I thought that careful and attentive appreciation of the world around me would prevent that.

Oh, how wrong I was.

It’s already spring semester, sophomore year.

That means after this semester, I will be 50% percent finished with college.

50%.

That’s like, half.

Boy, does time fly fast.

Just 8 days left, then I’m going home.

Sophomore year’s been interesting so far. Luckily, I didn’t really experience the dreaded ‘sophomore slump.’ This may have been because my classes were dramatically different in both content and style compared to last year. It may have also been me being a bit more involved on campus, comparatively. Either way, sophomore year, up till now, has been a welcome change from freshman year (the end of which was just a blur of papers, exams, and take out).

Which is weird in a way. Because I was definitely more excited about my first year, seeing how it was supposed to be ‘life changing’ and what not. But in hindsight, my first two semesters here were all about being thrown into the deep end. I’d never travelled completely alone internationally before, never lived alone for significant periods of time, never not had family around constantly.

And while they proved to be pretty transformative, they were also perhaps a little overwhelming. This year I think I’m just a little more equipped to handle such change/pressure.

For one, I’m a little more comfortable doing things on my own, unsupported. Counting on close friends and family for support wasn’t even something I knew I did till I couldn’t. And not having that crutch was really unsettling in the beginning.

But it’s not anymore. And that’s pretty great.

Last Saturday, I had the great fortune of going to the Hyphen (Asian-American Student Association) Cultural Showcase.

Bryn Mawr is lucky to have a significant Asian population on campus. A population that some might argue often gets homogenized into one big lump. This cultural showcase blew that assumption out of the water.

Pieces in the event covered art forms from across the continent.

From Japanese Taiko drumming (Performed by Swarthmore Taiko)…

…to traditional Chinese ribbon dance…

…to Kpop (performed by BMC Choom Boom)…

This is from last year, but still just as good

…to an exceptionally entertaining Wushu inspired performance of Peter Pan (performed by Wellesley Wushu).

The show didn’t limit itself to just music and dance though.

Jennifer Vo Le performed spoken word poetry written about navigating her experiences being queer and her identity as Vietnamese American.

And Jason Chu performed socially aware rap.

And of course, how could I forget?

The food was excellent.

This Friday, I attended an event hosted by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) entitled Rumi: Divine Love. It was a lecture by Ustadh Feraidoon Mojadedi about the relationship between Rumi and his teacher Shams of Tabrez. The event promised to “examine a number of Rumi’s poems in hopes that we can learn a thing or two from his ancient wisdom, and divine love.”

Rhoads Dining Hall had been decked out in beautiful fairy lights. At the back was an assortment of cookies, a perk I took full advantage of.

Gradually the audience began to trickle in, a significant number of whom had come all the way over from Philadelphia.

The event opened to Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore who recited poetry he wrote describing his various experiences in Islam.

After Mr. Moore, Ustadh Mojadedi took the stage to deliver the lecture he had prepared.

He argued that the form the message appears in is just as important as the message itself. The form is what sets the ground for the way the content is to be understood. It provides a framework for the content to exist in, without which the content would be meaningless.

Essentially, that form has meaning.

In scripture, enlightenment and knowledge aren’t strewn across the text haphazardly, for the reader to encounter out of sheer coincidence. Their introduction follows a certain rhyme, a certain reason.

And it is the job of the reader to tease that out of the text, much in the same way Rumi had to tease out knowledge from Shams.

The evening inevitably led to a lot of conversation once the event had ended, a good way to start the weekend.

On Monday, I got to go see Marty Moss-Coane speak at The Kelly Writers House at Penn.

For those unfamiliar with Philadelphia airwaves, Marty’s been on the air for the last 27 years for two hours every day. She’s gotten to talk to people like Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, and Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.

The purpose of her visit was to talk about the process of interviewing someone, making them comfortable enough to share their experiences while also making sure that the conversation doesn’t just dribble into meaningless banter that becomes boring to listen to.

I was required to attend the talk for my journalistic storytelling class at Penn which, among other very important things, has taught me that long paragraphs are bane of the modern reader.

Now all that needs to be done is to apply that knowledge to real-world writing about people, a feat which is obviously much easier said than done.

It’s that time of year again.

Pre-registration has officially opened and all around, I see people poring over department websites, picking out courses.

The problem in my case is that we’re only allowed to pre register for four credits. Four credits is not nearly enough for me to take all the classes I want.

Do I choose this Psychology class that I’ve been waiting a year for, or, this religion class at Penn about Hinduism that looks so interesting? What about this economic development class at Haverford that compares India and China? Oh but there’s an economic development class here at Bryn Mawr by a professor I’ve heard only good things about. All these cities classes look so great, but so do all these English classes…

And on and on and on.

At one point in my shopping cart (it’s this place that you can sign up for courses before actually pre-registering for them) I had nine courses and no idea which ones I wanted to weed out.

I decided that since I was most likely going to major in cities, it would make sense to start fulfilling requirements for that major.

After much turmoil, I finally pre registered for three cities classes and a psychology class.

What it boils down to is that there are simply too many good options.

And ultimately, the ordeal of having to forego one good option for another good option is such a privilege to have.

Most of first year, I couldn’t help but feel that as an international student who was in this part of the world for only four (now three) short years, I didn’t make nearly enough use of my proximity to Philadelphia. I would go into the city every few weeks with some friends to run some errand and catch a bite, but would rarely stick around to explore the city.

This semester, thankfully, I have fewer complaints of that sort. The major reason is that this semester I actually have a journalism class at Penn so going into the city once a week is a must anyway.

The other reason is that this time around, I’ve also made more of an effort to be a part of stuff happening around campus itself. For the current year, I am treasurer of the newly renamed South Asian Students (SAS) affinity group and this weekend, in collaboration with the Muslim Students Association (MSA), we held our annual Eid-Diwali Dinner.

After a week of frantic organizing, form submitting, playlist making, and catering deciding, it was finally the day of the event.

Our deepest fears went unrealized and the turnout was larger than we expected.

I am pretty sure the food had something to do with it.

After everyone was full and sated, they made it to the front of the hall, which was turned into an impromptu dance floor.

Once the night had wound down and we all made our way back to our rooms, out of sheer serendipity, I discovered my dorm, Erdman, was hosting the Night Owls acapella concert.

A friend and myself caught the tail end of the concert and a frighteningly good rendition of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.”

Finally, as if one stroke of luck wasn’t enough, Saturday night saw daylight savings hours being implemented which meant I got a whopping nine hours of sleep.

Pretty sweet Saturday I’d say.

Last night, I trekked over to Thomas Great Hall for the first event in the Dissent, Violence, Justice series by Mona Eltahawy titled “Revolution One-ism at a Time: The Global Fight vs Sexism, Racism and Other -isms.”

Mona has an impressive list of accolades to her name but for the sake of brevity, she is famous world over as a muslim/feminist or muslim+feminist (depending on who you ask) journalist. Lots of people know her as the woman who was explaining the Egyptian revolution to the west, a title that took me, personally, by surprise but an all fairness, I wasn’t living in the west when the revolution happened.

I was interested in the talk however, because some years ago, in a debates session we had in high school, we were shown a youtube clip as a case study of how to make or break your argument. The clip in question involved two women, both of the Islamic persuasion, talking to an American news anchor and discussing opposing sides of the niqaab* debate. Mona was staunchly against it, praising France’s decision to ban it as the right thing to do, whereas the other lady denounced France from taking away from its citizens a fundamental right of choice.

Mona in this video, was the ‘bad’ debater. As we deconstructed her arguments later, we criticized them for containing blanket statements, straw man fallacies, and willful negligence of the point at hand.

The criticism that no one made but everyone thought was that she was simply being used as a mouthpiece from that section of the global liberal media that is all for muslim rights as long as they conform to their idea of what muslim or religious expression should look like.

Fast forward some five years and I see a poster for her event. Piqued, I decide to attend, albeit with some reservations still lingering in my head from that video.

When Mona walks up to the stage, I notice her fire cracker red hair. She begins to recount the story of how when she was protesting in Cairo, she was arrested. Her detainers beat her hard enough to break both her arms, sexually assaulted her, and kept her in their custody for six hours without a warrant.

She talks of how to reclaim her body both physically and emotionally, she dyed her hair red and got two tattoos. The first one, on her right forearm, is of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. According to Mona, Sekhmet is the goddess of sex and retribution and thus important to her because the friction between those two things is something Mona herself feels she encompasses as both a sex positive feminist and someone trying to reclaim her body.

Through out her talk, I hear her opinions on things that I can’t help but think need to go out to a wider audience. She talked of how sex, race, and class end up becoming the “bermuda triangle” that so many of us get lost in, something that resonated with me since in my experience rarely do people want to talk about all three at one given point. The fact that Mona did was refreshing.

She humorously retells getting arrested again, this time in New York, for defacing the now infamous Defeat Jihad subway ads. Many in the audience titter uncomfortably but her story is again about triumph, she was able to bring attention to the issue in a way few others did.

She mentions constantly talking of borderlands, of edges corners and margins, places where the oppressed often find themselves, because that is where she feels most at home.

And I realize that this is Mona’s story.

While I may not agree with all of it, and quite frankly it doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t, her politics are ultimately aimed at bringing attention to such places that people would rather never visit. And even if nothing else, that keeps the dialogue going which is enough.

Her second tattoo is incidentally of the street where she got arrested in Cairo, another place few of us would like to revisit, but one that she has reclaimed and permanently etched across her body.

*a niqaab is the face veil alternately hailed as a sign of Islamic modesty, a political/social statement, an illegal face mask, or an expression of personal choice.