Harrison Haiku

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I apparently cannot get enough of the South Loop. You see, unlike many students who attend Columbia College, I am a resident of Chicago, who, more unusually, went to Jones College Prep High School between 2002-2006, a "magnet" high school located only steps away from Columbia College's campus.

I always found myself riding to Harrison to get to Jones at the butt crack of dawn and I remember how the gym-less Jones traveled their students from Harrison to North/Clybourn on the Red Line for our Homecoming Pep Rally every year. The memories, oh they are so bittersweet.

However, one memory that will be eternally ingrained in my thoughts is the previous state of the Harrison Red Line: filthy, smelly and infested with homeless crack addicts and a seemingly pregnant and frazzled woman (not in the right state of mind) who would ask me for change as I got off the train for school. She eventually had her baby, I suppose, or maybe she found another stop to lurk at. Around the time she left, I had graduated and was well on my way to Columbia College.

Around this time, there was change and growth in my life and in my surroundings. I was a fresh-faced college student, excited about his degree and his chance at independence. I found myself using the "entrance" and "exit" of the Harrison Red Line all the time and believe my words, it has changed dramatically.

In January 2008, the spark that lit this dreary eL stop came to life in the form of Haiku poems written by Jones College Prep and Columbia College students. One haiku stood out in particular:

Because of one
Missing sock, I had to
Change my outfit.

This simple observation about socks revealed the neighborhood that awaited above the underground: a place where students, young professionals and fashionistas thrived. With such close proximity to downtown, it was the "hip" place to be, as students from the dorm clutter the streets of the South Loop like flies on honey, aimlessly buzzing around in search of fun, temptation and everyday struggles. It was a place to be seen and heard (judging from popular spots like Reggie's Music Joint and Grant Park during Lollapalooza, as well as that Taste of Chicago down the street).

Fourteen months later, the same poems litter the bright platform that once used to be called "dreary" and "dangerous" by many of my fellow peers. Now, it is more culturally significant in the fact that the letters presented in the poems have started to fade, especially in the middle of the platform. Like Jones and Columbia, I have found that the middle is better the beginning, but always a struggle when you look at the finish line. Currently, I'm in the middle of college and I'm burnt out and almost faded in a way, like the letters itself. It happened to me during my Junior Year of high school too, as magnet schools like Jones clamored to be the best school in the city.

Even during my classes, I found the middle of the semester to be the most difficult part. Teachers hate their students and their lackadasical and unmotivated attitude, and students are simply tired of their teachers belaboring them to death. It's a common cycle that always happens in small, intimate classroom settings.

However, at the end of that platform stands a degree: a symbol of hope and prosperity. A light at the end of the tunnel, where life begins and dreamy endings are chased. Much more than the haiku itself, the Harrison stop now has a Polk stop, a brand-new stop for a much more accessible future. At Columbia College, we are challenged to create change and become successful. Change itself invokes growth and if a simple stop can renovate itself, we can do so ourselves in our everyday lives, even if the journey gets gritty along the way.

Outside the boundaries of urban life: Suburbia

Angst-ridden teenagers rebelling against their parents and the subsequent establishment? Sounds like the 2004-2006 to me. But during (what I call) the Dark Ages, there was this thread that kept my family together: Desperate Housewives. No, not the Real Housewives of Orange County, which I find to be repulsive, but those mean-spirited stepford wives from Wisteria Lane, always plottin' and always schemin' their way around men, murder, etc.

It was during the second season where my dear mother incessantly spoke about this show, as if it was the holy-grail of suburban life: a life my mother really never had. Living in a city all of our natural lives, my family has no idea what the suburbs are. In fact, the very idea of manicured lawns and casseroles stewing on the windowsill scares the living crap out of me.

Anyways, back to story time. Mom enslaved us with dinner, got my dad watching the show after a few well-placed meals on Sunday night, and soon my brother and I were trapped in Desperate Housewives-land with my merry parents, who could not get enough of the scandal and drama Desperate Housewives has to offer. After the second season was over, my brother and I caved in and we became that one urban family with a fixation for suburban sensationalism.

Desperate Housewives is a surprisingly good show. Each of the main housewives are played wonderfully by actresses who, not only look the part, but also give the show a comedic edge with their different, yet over-the-top characters. But who can blame these juicy roles when these women are faced with husbands who love sadomasochism, illegal Asian maids and illegitimate children.

These desperate housewives are usually no better. They are alcoholics and murderers at moments in their life, they sleep with their gardeners and make their husbands go to prison as a way of repentance.

I must've mentioned at least six different plot lines, and believe me, that is only the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous twists and turns at every corner of Wisteria Lane, eventually culminating into a season-long investigation into a murderer or sociopath's quest for revenge.

What I found truly amazing about this show is its' cultural significance. Desperate Housewives is culturally significant in the sole fact that it exposes a seemingly-perfect world (suburbia) and flips it upside-down to reveal an ugly underbelly of secrets and lies, perpetuated by violence, greed and tough love.



Take the show's narrator Mary Alice Young for example. She killed a drug-abusing mother because she was afraid to lose her foster child to the real mother, a heroin user. The overwhelming grief of murdering someone made Mary Alice commit suicide in the pilot episode, thus becoming the omni-present housewife who watches her friends from heaven as she relays inspirational messages of wisdom at the start and end of each episode.

I have never experienced suburban life, nor do I think I will ever succumb to being a stepford husband. But it's fun to watch housewives' lives like these implode from afar. I'll stick to inner-city violence and mounting financial debt from college, thank you very much.

I really hate Hipsters, however I write like one.

You can’t deny their presence in a local dive bar, knocking back Stella Artois and other imported Belgium beers. Unique in everything they do, they listen to the most exclusive and obscure music that you have probably never heard of. They are trend setters in the sense that they love organic food and only shop at boutiques or thrift stores to find one-of-a-kind items that would never be in any regular department store. They are the kind of people known as Hipsters.

The problem is these people are the local celebrities that are looked up to by the less fortunate. They look fabulous and I can’t deny that I’ve wanted the expensive clothes on their body, but I simply couldn’t afford it. They have an undeniable style and they always get a lot of attention for being that uniquely complicated individual that values independent thought and cheap wine. But then I think to myself: is the person actually hip or is it just about jumping on different trends to stay above the “normal” population?

I think their contributions to the mainstream population should be applauded. No, I really mean it! They often find those bands that are popularized at outdoor music festivals, where they get discovered by music journalists at Vice, Pitchfork Media and Alternative Press, which then get discovered by national music magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin many months later.

They contribute to the economy by working at low-paying jobs and coffeehouses that may not succeed without their ever-constant presence by both hipster employees and the hipsters who hang out in their favorite Chintz chair, blogging incessantly about their daily rumblings and grumblings on the free Wi-Fi network. They love coffee, which keeps generating cash for the foreign coffee trade business (which does not truly support the farmers who actually produce and roast the coffee beans. But the corporate businesses are certainly flourishing, thus stimulating the “currently” dismal worldwide economic outlook.

They are the art students at Columbia College, disguised in tight, black jeans and a messy, yet perfectly styled haircut that we secretly wish we want when we head out to the bars, just because it looks like an effortless creation. They are purveyors of poetry readings, open mikes and art and fashion shows and they always know where to get the best food and which bars to go (dance at) once the sun goes down.

So why are hipsters hated by the general mainstream population? They have a pretentious and condescending attitude, and they can be driven by the things they own. One can say that in the effort of trying to be cool, they’ve lost sense of the individual they once were before they began to care about staying “hip” or “cool” in order to look good.

Luckily, the definition of hipster is pretty much in the realm of hilarious public opinion. Check out the definition of Hipster on Urban Dictionary or the blog Stuff White People Like as well as the blog Stuff Hipsters Don't Like to get an up-to-date list on some Hipster favorites.