Oh folks it has been a week. Monday morning it seemed like my worst-case scenario for spring housing would be a small, inconveniently-located double room on West Campus. And just a couple days later, my worst-case (and still very, very likely!!) scenario is a horribly-located, falling-apart, full-of-black-mold-and-asbestos room on Central with a random roommate as a second-semester junior. Students in frats/sororities and SLG’s get right of return, so they’re fine, and students with the financial means & freedom to score an off-campus apartment three months before move-in will be fine. But anyone else is being punished by the Duke Housing gods for doing the one thing Duke wants us to do more than anything else: study abroad so they have good statistics to show on the admissions page. I applied to Duke for a lot of reasons: the school spirit (i.e. K-ville), the professors, the student-to-faculty ratio, the research opportunities, the gorgeous, gorgeous campus. And I also applied to Duke because of the incredible global education opportunities– 200+ around the world! And 50% of students studying abroad! I am so thrilled to be able to live in Rome for school this semester, and have been looking forward to this part of my education since the very beginning of freshman year. And maybe living in a literal s***hole is a small price to pay for this chance, but I am furious and distressed that Duke is punishing us for doing something that will contribute to the University’s appeal to prospective students. I know it’s a housing fluke, that it’s an unexpected mistake that housing is just so full right now, that it’ll only be for a semester. But still, it is difficult to grapple with the fact that at my favorite school in the world, I will be living in an isolated, filthy, terrifying part of campus that is going to be demolished as soon as we move out in May: Duke obviously knows Central is horrible because they’re tearing it down this summer, but they’re still going to stick us there for the last semester of its squalid, depraved existence.
Okay with that rant out of my system, it was also A Week for other, vastly more important reasons: the lunacy that is Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing. I do not have the words to go into why this has been so upsetting, nor do I think you need me to: everyone I care about will be as deeply affected by the atrocities committed by the GOP (and their complete lack of compunction in doing so) as I am. Suffice it to say that I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and shame on everyone who is content with valuing the career of a wealthy white man and the advancement of their own political agenda over the pain of a fifteen-year-old girl, a lifetime of trauma, and the suffering of anyone else who has been abused in similar ways.
It has been a teary, difficult week for me and so many others. But I am cheered by and grateful for so many things: Beloved friends, new and old, near and far. Monuments of marble and brick that stand, millenia later, as testaments to those who built them. Good poetry. Nights cool enough to wear flannel pajamas, followed by sunny, breezy days that finally feel like September. Renaissance frescoes and Imperial mosaics. Misty-morning views of the river that take your breath away. Silly nights out with dear friends in fancy dresses to a 1920s speakeasy bar (secret password included!). Excitement for trips and places still waiting to be explored: Sicily, Venice, Bologna, Assisi, Pompeii, Naples, Sorrento, Tucson. Companionship with people who fell silent and held my hands as we cried in the dining room when the vote ended and Kavanaugh passed. And above all, the courage of a woman to speak out, knowing it would disrupt her life, knowing her family would receive death threats, knowing her life would be irrevocably changed, knowing if she said nothing, millions of people would be under the sphere of influence of an attempted rapist. Her courage is inspiring and life-giving and I can only hope it is contagious.
Interesting details from inside the Castel Sant’Angelo: note the well in the courtyard, the Pope’s private bathroom, the breasted, mustachioed man, and the baboons!
Wright Now 