It's 2008

When I was an undergrad, times were different. A democrat was in office (for most of it). We were impeaching a president for a silly willy. People smoked outside of buildings, even the pre-med buildings. Girls mostly wore sweatpants and hoodies and backpacks. Guys wore the current uniform of t's shorts and hats. Nary a cell phone, absolutely no ipods, barely even email. Emailing your paper to the prof was insane~! Blackboards were still black and had chalk. Libraries still had books not computers with these wonderful PDFs. Few took a lap top to class, and texting was absurd. I don't think anyone spoke of the election much, and t-shirts were about beer not political agendas.

Well... as a grad student eight years later, many things have changed. The girls dress to the nines with heels and bags, sunglasses and hoops. Everyone is either on a cell phone, texting while walking, or looking for their phone while walking across campus. I smile every time I see a bumper sticker or t-shirt or pin or artwork on a backpack. You know why I'm smiling? Because each and everyone one of them say vote for Obama. I'm not really seeing any Republican propaganda around. Hooray! Now this may correspond with moving from a red state to a blue state or from the beautiful west to the refinery traffic ridden east. But I think the college vote just may work in our favor this time. They (we) might actually get out and Barack the vote.

On the high school front... In my hoodlum ridden class (my favorite of the day this year) students presented symbiotic relationships in groups. I had the idea for them to act out their symbiotic relationships for the class but neglected to assign it because it was hard enough to get them to make the poster. But during the presentation 2 groups actually did a modern dance interpretation of their organisms acting symbiotically and I was totally impressed! One was of a tubeworm and a bacteria, the other of the "mafia" brown headed cowbird that lays eggs in another birds nest and then when the bird is born it kills all the other babies by pushing their eggs out of the nest.

Now, the teacher (me) thought that was the best part of the group presentations of course. But the show stopper, the item that had the entire class discussing and listening? What was that? "Backrow Boy"'s shirt that had a picture of Bush with the word EVIL written across his forehead (in sharpie pen) and the quote on the side "not my president" and in the sharpie pen "too young to vote"!!