crazy shit
i went to SPAC today. i ran one mile, and i ran it in 7:45. sure, it’s not particularly fast, but it ain’t bad for me, and it’s probably the fastest mile i’ve run since senior year of high school, or possibly even freshman year.
if interested, please pick up a copy of How to Make Up for Your Inability to Balance a Budget by Writing Parking Tickets: A Fiscal Primer, available from the Evanston City Council for $0.75/hr.
crazy, crazy shit. this year’s Miss America, Erika Harold, went to my hated high school, Urbana University High School. as some of you know, i had a horrible experience at that place. (if you don’t know the story, you can read a very brief account.) anyway, the crazy shit is that Miss America’s platform this year is “anti-bullying programs at high schools,” and that’s precisely because she was bullied at Uni High! the News-Gazette has a good write-up about the entire saga. (i should mention that i definitely was not bullied at Uni; everyone there was too much of a pussy to do anything physical.)
as you can see in the article, the bullying was part of a larger problem of sexual harassment that both Harold and another girl, “H”, experienced at Uni. (small world: i went to elementary school with H. she was an uppity little bitch. note: i previously had her full name posted on this page, but she contacted me to have it removed. she is therefore referred to only by the first letter of her first name.) in fact, H took a sexual harassment suit against Uni High all the way to the Supreme Court and won (see the discussion on FindLaw). the court found that schools can be held liable for student-on-student sexual harassment, which effectively held the school to be negligient in not preventing the harassment. H has since settled out-of-court with Uni for $215,000.
what is even crazier is that H came to Northwestern for college, so some of you might know her. coincidentally, one of her sexual harassers (i think it was Sandeep, Rupi’s brother, but i could be wrong about that, so don’t take it as gospel) also came to Northwestern. H was then able to get a restraining order against him and force him to leave NU. i found that out from a friend of mine who was in Sig Ep with Sandeep.
that’s some crazy, crazy shit, huh?
oh, and perhaps the most telling part of that News-Gazette article? the spokesman for Uni says this, in response to the negative spotlight put on Uni by Harold:
“They are all equally proud of Erika and the guts she’s shown to make a national statement about an issue as important as this. They are as proud as they can be of Erika. They are proud of having the highest average ACT score in the nation last year, at 32. Uni is a good place to be, and we’re proud to have it as part of the university system.”
yep, if the ACT score is high, what else matters? this is a school that announces the colleges their graduates are going to as they are walking across the stage at their graduation. if that isn’t a blinders-on factory for standardized test nerds, i don’t know what is. it’s fucking disgusting. i mean that.