Ah, sexually transmitted infections. The modern scarlet letter. “Stay away!” we cry. Particularly if it’s herpes. Oh, religious deity, forbid it be herpes.

For many, STIs exist on an intangible parallel plane. This or that promiscuous so-and-so might have had it coming, but we’d like to think we’re far removed from that plane of existence. STIs are seen as “dirty,” a blight upon whoever might have them. We dread joining their ranks.

In truth, however, STIs are as ubiquitous as bedbugs in New York. And like bedbugs, STIs are often more discomfiting than necessarily nefarious. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly all sexually active adults will contract some strain of HPV at some point, but the body magics away most HPV infections.

This unfortunately isn’t quite the case with herpes, the second-most-common medically incurable STI. One in six people in the United States — 50 million people, y’all — have genital herpes, or HSV-2, and somewhere between 60 and 80 percent have oral herpes, or HSV-1, also called canker sores. Although there is no cure for either strain, both can be treated and their symptoms vastly ameliorated. And for the more notorious HSV-2, besides the occasional flare-up — which can lie dormant for years, in any case — there doesn’t seem to be any larger health issues. No complications with the female reproductive tract, no internal damage, no cancer.

Despite HSV-2’s commonness and relative harmlessness, it is still surrounded by social stigma second only to HIV, according to a 2007 Harris Interactive Poll. Not to cast HIV as some sort of extreme (modern medicine can help the HIV-positive live long lives full of salacious sex if they like), but herpes? C’mon. It’s like slightly misplaced acne.

Let’s start by asking you, the reader: Would you call a relationship off if your potential or current partner told you he or she had herpes? In the Harris poll, most respondents without HSV-2 said they would either avoid partners with herpes or end things with their partner if they were told he or she had herpes. That’s indiscriminately voting one out of every sixth potential mate out for something that doesn’t cause any problems and that doesn’t need to be passed on if you practice safer sex. For groups with one herpes-positive partner and one not, paying attention to breakouts and always using condoms and/or antiviral medications can cut your rate transmission down to 1 to 2 percent per year of regular sex — pretty minuscule, if you ask me.

The most alarming statistic in my eyes is that an estimated 80 percent of people with herpes don’t even know they have it. Yeah, we’ve talked about how herpes isn’t that bad. But the larger issue behind this stat — besides not possessing the ability to be open with your partner or practicing safer sex — is the fact that these people probably aren’t getting tested for other entirely curable — but more dangerous — STIs such as chlamydia, trichomoniasis, gonorrhea and syphilis, either. This convenient forgetfulness or ignorance about our own susceptibility to STIs could potentially be what damns us. We sexually active folk are likely all exposed to STIs at some point in time, so why do we evade the issue?

Chlamydia, trich, gonorrhea (the “clap”) and syphilis are all bacterial, so you can be rid of them for good with treatment. Left alone, however, they can have devastating effects in the long run, although they might not manifest any symptoms in the short run. Chlamydia — the most commonly reported STI — and gonorrhea can cause infertility if left untreated. Scary syphilis, if not caught early on, can cause damage to the brain, heart and nervous system and possibly even lead to death.

If you’re sexually active, whatever sex you identify as, the CDC recommend getting tested for chlamydia, gonorrhea and HIV once a year. The Tang Center covers an annual checkup for chlamydia, the clap, HIV and Pap smears (the last recommended to be administered every three years for women above the age of 21). Other STIs, such as trich, syphilis and herpes, aren’t generally tested for unless you feel you have been exposed to them or display symptoms, but you can ask for these screenings at either the Tang Center or Planned Parenthood.

Stigma won’t go down without a fight, unfortunately, but perhaps talking about it and dispelling falsehoods will help combat it. Hopefully with more openness and knowledge will come more testing, acceptance, treatment and discussion. It’s better to play it safe and get routinely checked, so if necessary, you can plan ahead or get treated accordingly — but remember, it’s not an end-all if you contract something. Life and sex go on. A tour guide and actor at Kink.com once told a classmate of mine about the first thing a colleague told him when he discovered he had herpes: “Welcome to the club.” You won’t be alone.

Vi Nguyen writes the weekly Sex on Tuesday column. You can contact her at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @yonictonic.

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“Kill the Mexicans!” my friend hollered as we watched a movie. Some of my housemates groaned. Others chuckled. I stayed quiet even though I’m Mexican American. We all continued watching the movie; it’s easy to shrug off discrimination when it’s not directly targeted at you.

Where I used to live, choosing not to challenge racist remarks was one of the compromises I made to fit in. I was a resident of a student housing cooperative where most of my housemates were white. And to be honest, not speaking up about racism wasn’t a compromise as much as it was a requirement. For instance, my housemates wanted to throw a “White Trash” party. In high school my friends called each other white trash, but I never thought I could, because I wasn’t white and didn’t live in a trailer park, as they did. Thinking about my high school friends, I opposed the party. Because of my position, I was booed. My housemates complained about not having the party until I moved out.

Racist remarks were also commonplace at my former co-op. During lunch, one of my friends, a humanities student with a 4.0, talked about interning with “dumb” blacks. Another housemate, a popular guy, posted a flier on his door depicting black graduate students laughing. It read: “Excellence Through Despite Diversity.” My housemates tolerated and ignored racist remarks such as this. Like minorities with strong cultural differences, individuals who were racists were seen as “transitioning” into a cooperative environment. The problem here is that minorities were the victims while racist individuals were the opposite. In putting up with these racist remarks, we effectively tolerated racism.

Some of my well-meaning housemates claimed that we live in a post-racial America and that thus, racism doesn’t exist. Yet students of color still face racist prejudice, meaning we can’t overcompensate for our progress toward racial equality by claiming racism doesn’t exist. Rather than condemning discrimination, other housemates told me to develop a “thicker” skin. Students of color are told this all the time. This may be well-intended advice, because we, like everyone else in the world, should learn how to deal with adversity maturely. It’s unfair, however, to say students of color need to be bullied into maturity. Certain students have the privilege of using discrimination to one-up others. They discriminate to make others feel bad. They also discriminate “jokingly,” as when my housemate hollered, “Kill the Mexicans!”

While it’s easy to show that remarks such as this are prejudiced, it’s much more difficult to prove that the actions of an institution are prejudiced. In the words of professor Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, individuals have the privilege “to be prejudiced without having to admit to themselves or others that race plays any part.” The pervasiveness of this privilege fuels the ambiguity and anxiety surrounding institutional racism. For instance, two years ago, the Berkeley College Republicans staged an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale.” They believed this could start a “debate” on campus. Mocking policies that give admissions preference to underprivileged communities under the guise of “starting a debate” is no less racist and equally problematic.

One way our university shows our enduring commitment to diversity is hanging up banners of nonwhite students on campus. Yet over the past few years, state funding for public education has been drastically reduced. As a result, UC Berkeley has more and more out-of-state students as well as reduced access to spaces intended for students of color. In other words, UC Berkeley had to choose between having nice things or nonrich Californians of color. As the banners demonstrate, underprivileged students are considered part of the university’s “nice things”; something it gets to parade around without having to answer for the consequences of what ensuring diversity actually means.

The problem here is not that the university doesn’t want to enroll more underprivileged students. It’s that in a time of economic hardship, our university was able to forgo its mission to educate Californians of different economic and racial backgrounds. It’s that, despite the university’s best efforts, budget cuts were not distributed equally. It’s unclear now whether an undergraduate education will be as affordable or accessible as it once was or whether international and out-of-state students will be pitted against Californians for enrollment.

Public institutions should operate on the same principles their constituents do. Their actions should be evaluated not only on the intent behind them but also on the impact they have on the communities they serve. And as I experienced, racist attitudes are still present and can go unchallenged throughout the community — whether it’s in a Berkeley housing co-op or at an event organized by college Republicans. Like most American cities, our campus struggles to integrate the student body racially even though diversity increases overall. It’s time we paid attention to what this means.

Josh Escobar writes the Monday column on the intersection of student and urban life. You can contact him at jescobar@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @urbananimale.

The post Racism in Berkeley never left appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Bookworms, that is.

Last month, I left work completely overwhelmed. The 49 wasn’t coming, so I walked home on the hottest afternoon, ever. I’m pretty sure parts of my skin melted off in protest of the high temperature — I have yet to discover the patches they left behind. On the corner of Ashby and College, I wished I could ditch my rock of a bag and the huge Amazon box in my arms without any regret. By the time I got to Telegraph Avenue, I was secretly wishing Cal had lost its game against Portland so the jubilant crowds sporting Cal gear would stop being so damn chipper and happy.

But somehow, by the time I reached Adeline, I had a wide smile on my face and an even bigger stack in my arms.

On the block between Shattuck and Adeline stands a small white house with a slanted, bridgelike white porch. And that porch was exploding with books. I could almost hear it grunting as it tried to support all the books it carried. A tiny handmade cardboard sign quietly announced that the books scattered on the porch cost 50 cents to $2, which made me wonder where the rest of the Berkeleyans were and why they weren’t there fighting over Dickens and Camus.

I have serious issues when it comes to buying books: I don’t know when to stop. Growing up in an Arab country, where the average a person reads was about half a page a year, limited the variety and quantity of books available. So I buy books like I’ll never have the chance to again. I had to smuggle in small piles last year and hide them in my bedroom because my sister swore she would fight me if I brought one more book inside our already cramped apartment. Having moved to a bigger place, I saw this as my chance to decorate.

I step inside, and suddenly I’m in paradise, where piles and piles and piles of books cover every inch of furniture. Excluding bookstores and libraries, I have never seen so many books in one place. I didn’t know where to start.

A tanned Armenian man in his late 40s walks into my newly discovered wonderland, wiping his hands on his apron as he informs me about his plans to cook for 40 friends that night. He then notices the book I’m holding, “Asterix et Obelix,” shouts its name in French and then expresses his deepest apologies: He cannot sell that book, as it has too much sentimental value.

I spent about 40 minutes with him, talking about a wide range of topics, from the Israeli treatment of olive trees — prompted by my interest in a book called “Cooking with Olive Oil” — to the library scene in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” all the while my ADHD kicking in and drawing my attention to that stack of “Harry Potter” hardcovers perched precariously on the edge of the table, the worn-out Hemingway book on the ground, the discolored French children’s book on the old TV set.

I left his house promising I would stay for dinner next time and wobbled along with my new 17 books that I got for 40 bucks, plus an elementary Arabic book he gave me for free to give to my friend. As I skipped happily — and fell repeatedly — down Ashby, I remembered my trip across the border from Jordan to Syria a few years back. The soldier searching my bag nudged a book with the butt of his gun and asked me what that was doing in my suitcase. I didn’t know how to answer him. The person driving me hastened to answer, “Mu’allem, she studies in America: They make them read books there.”

No, I wanted to say, I read because when I was a kid, I fell deeply in love with reading. My father would stuff duffel bags with books and travel with overflowing suitcases halfway around the world, all so my heart would break with Fred Weasley’s death, so I would go through the war on Tara with Scarlett, so I would live every emotion that colors Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s beautiful stories.

But I held my tongue. I felt a wave of gratitude toward my father wash over me. He’s the one who introduced me to the world of reading, which in itself has millions of different ports to other universes, some filled with black holes that suck us in once we get too close and others we must avoid at all costs because they are too alien and put our brain cells at risk, such as “Twilight.”

College = zero times the number of minutes spent on external reading. But, I am positive my love for books will emerge as a survivor after I graduate. “Harry Potter” DeCals and random Armenian men will help me make sure that happens.

And a special shout-out to my dad: Thanks for all the books and all the love. I hope your backaches will not go to waste.

Sarah Dadouch writes the Friday column on global perspectives of Berkeley. You can contact her at sdadouch@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @SarahDadouch.

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When we think of the big special-interest groups that wield undue influence in Sacramento, we think of huge corporations — oil, gas, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. We think of corporate lawyers lobbying for tax breaks and loopholes; we think of fat cats calling legislators they have under their thumbs.

But the biggest special-interest group isn’t an oil company. It’s not a pharmaceutical giant. It’s not even a combination of all of the above.

The biggest special-interest group, by far, is the one that represents the teachers of California. Over the past 13 years, the California Teachers Association has spent $290 million on influencing state politics. In context, it spent enough money on politics in the past few years to pay the annual salaries of 7,200 new high school teachers.

In the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 13 percent of fourth-graders and 16 percent of eighth-graders scored “Proficient” or above. Our average scaled score on those tests, 213, was below the averages of renowned educational powerhouses such as Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana. In 2005, Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a number of initiatives aimed at addressing California’s education woes. These proposals would have reformed the public education system in California. Instead of working with Schwarzenegger on them, however, the CTA blatantly opposed any idea of reform.

One such reform was Proposition 74, which the CTA spent $8 million to defeat. This measure would have extended the probationary period for teachers from two to five years before they could receive tenure, giving school districts more time to consider whether a teacher deserves the special protection tenure affords. In San Bernardino County, one principal found it was almost impossible to let go of unfit teachers who were tenured. One 20-year veteran was quoted as a “textbook case of a lousy teacher” who answered questions incorrectly, told her students to “sit (their) asses down” and called two of her students “gay.” Even after the principal found out, he had to spend $100,000 on legal fees and pay her another $25,000 to resign.

Proposition 75, another Schwarzenegger-backed initiative, sought to prevent unions from using mandatory dues to fund a union’s political activities. The CTA spent $12 million to defeat it. Prop. 75 was designed to protect the minority of teachers with differing political beliefs. In 2005, the CTA assessed an annual surcharge of $60 per teacher over the course of three years in order to raise $50 million to defeat Schwarzenegger’s reforms. Some teachers didn’t support the same agenda their union leadership did. Amber Calabrese, a teacher in the Chino Valley School District, said she supported Prop. 74. She appreciated her probationary period because it allowed administrators to regularly observe her teaching and give her tips that would improve it. Her opinion didn’t matter.

A large percentage of the hundreds of dollars in dues she paid that year, along with the $60 surcharge, would have been used to oppose the very initiative Calabrese supported.

Because California locks away the majority of its budget in fixed “mandatory spending” requirements, there have been long-standing concerns about the state’s flexibility when facing a budget crisis. Schwarzenegger recognized this problem in 2005, and he proposed Proposition 76, which would have tied education funding more to the annual decisions of legislators and less to a constitutional guarantee. It would also have created a more stringent spending cap based on the previous year’s spending, and the Legislative Analyst’s office wrote in its Fiscal Impact Statement that Prop. 76 would likely “reduce expenditures relative to current law.” The CTA spent $14 million to quash Prop. 76.

The problems of education in California are more fundamental than teacher tenure or mandatory union dues. They are rooted in widespread poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics and the prevalence of violence in American society. And on that deeper level, it’s impossible to place the blame on teachers for the lack of educational success in California. They cannot control what goes on at home or feed the students who come to class hungry.

But the CTA has to recognize that reform and compromise are necessary steps to a better education system. And regardless of everything that teachers cannot control, we have to provide them with the best tools possible in order to ensure the best education possible. And that will require the CTA to own up to the responsibilities that come with the significant influence it wields and embrace necessary reforms.

Kevin Gu writes the Thursday column on politics. You can contact him at kgu@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @gukevin888.

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I had gone through the longest dry spell of my nonvirgin life while studying abroad. By the time I returned to the good ol’ U.S. of A, my sex drive had all but shriveled up and died due to neglect. I thought I had found a new sort of sexless nirvana. So this is how people go months, even years, without doing the deed, I mused to myself. It was almost calming. Zen. I could keep doing this.

Zoom to Los Angeles. I was telling my good friend about this new state of being as I was relaxing on her bed in her new apartment, but it didn’t seem like she was paying me much heed. Rather, she was busy peering around the space, poking at neatly folded piles of clothing in her armoire. “Whoa, looks like my boyfriend hard-core cleaned the place up earlier. We were pretty high and I joked about our having a threesome tonight … I guess he took it seriously,” she said with a laugh.

If there is nothing else you glean from this article, just remember this: Very rarely does someone joke about having sex with you unless there’s some shrapnel of truth to it.

Three hours later, I was reflecting on the wisdom of this adage as my friend tried to hide her nervousness by flip-flopping between “joking” and testing the waters as to my level of interest. But then the moment of truth: “Wait … let’s actually do this. I’ve never had a threesome before.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes … Would you be down?”

Rest in peace, newfound temporary abstinence.

One very quick conversation about boundaries and rules later, my friend strips and giddily runs into the bedroom. I turn around to see her boyfriend behind me so I think, fuckheregoesnothingokay, and kiss him. But because I feel weird as hell — I’ve never been attracted to him, and this is the dude my friend is convinced she’s going to marry — I yank off his shirt and run off with it in what I hope seems appropriate and sexy. Inwardly, I feel like a five-year-old miscreant.

Previous to this exchange, the only advice I’d received regarding threesomes was to find a way to keep myself busy. This sounds frantic, but it’s actually a pretty good rule of thumb to keep from being discouraged; getting into the sharing groove of three is a distinct departure from the single-mindedness of having just one partner. When I wasn’t being stimulated, I found a way to incorporate myself in the romp, enhancing my friend and her boyfriend’s experience in some way or form; in turn, I was never neglected for very long. We spent a good chunk of the time laughing and making bawdy small talk, and there wasn’t a single heavy moment throughout.

Apparently, it was good enough for them to want another go a couple weeks later.

I don’t know what it was about the following summer. Maybe that first couple of threesomes really set the mood or something, but nearly all the sex I had in the following months was in groups of three or more. The starts of such romps were sometimes awkward, sometimes not, but they had one theme in common: their focus on casual good times. None of my experiences materialized as the lustful throng of body parts that I had previously stereotyped orgies to be — my partners and I just wanted a playful romp.

I have found that I cycle between periods of abstinence in which I tell myself to wait for someone I care about — having gotten tired of a string of loveless hook-ups — and subsequent periods of hedonistic lovefests after having gotten tired of waiting. But somehow, group sex doesn’t leave that sour taste in my mouth that casual hooking up often does. From my experience, there’s generally less emotional intensity and instead a focus on just having some lascivious feels and fun. Maybe it’s because things aren’t personal, but people feel calmer — it’s not about getting to the passionate pinnacle of orgasm.

Rather, the intent is simply goofing and playing around with many sets of naughty body parts. And one huge perk: You can leave whenever you want. Done? Respectfully slip out. Your remaining partners will either continue or let things come to a natural end. And communicating what you want in this often-goofy, sometimes bizarre situation is easy, since things usually don’t get intense to the point where speech disappears.

Although I feel too occupied to emotionally invest in something serious at this juncture, this doesn’t mean I don’t want to still have fun in the sack. But sometimes I’m not into the intensity or faux-seriousness that might accompany your standard fuck buddy. For pure sex and giggles, I’ve found group sex to be a whimsical outlet for thrills and fun.

Vi Nguyen writes the Sex on Tuesday column. You can contact her at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @yonictonic.

The post How I came to love group sex appeared first on The Daily Californian.

One cannot undermine the power of nature to restore itself. The morning after it rains in Berkeley, everything outside looks so fresh. The wood shingles and turquoise tile of Cloyne Court and Soda Hall are clean and vibrant. The sidewalks are damp. Streets glisten. From Northside, I amble downhill over puddles and gutters toward the Berkeley Marina. In Downtown, I catch the 51B, which takes me over train tracks and Interstate 80, then drops me off at the waterfront. The smell of wet earth is heavy in the outdoor air.

It’s been seven years since former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency” when 58,000 gallons of Cosco-Busan oil spilled into the San Francisco Bay. Now, things are more or less OK at the marina. The birds and their mudflats are no longer tarred. The shellfish are, arguably, safe to eat again. The extension of the Bay Trail, partially funded by Cosco-Busan oil-spill reparations, is open to bikers and pedestrians. Soon, the do-it-yourself trash cleanup stations, which are fully funded by reparations, will be installed along the shoreline.

Although the Cosco-Busan oil spill was, according to Shorebird Park naturalist coordinator Patty Donald, “horrible and massive,” the truth is the marina itself was founded on enormous loads of trash. Trains ran along the beaches of the East Bay until Berkeley began pouring landfill into the bay. While activism has diverted landfill away from the bay, we still haven’t stopped what Donald calls “an ongoing onslaught.” She’s referring to the shoreline pollution caused not by oil spills but by rain.

“When it rains,” Donald says, “everything comes off the streets.”

On the shoreline, any day of the year you’ll find cigarette butts, food wrappers and bead-sized plastic pellets — along with leaves, pine cones and the exoskeletons of little crabs. What you won’t find with the naked eye, however, are the pesticides, molecules of plastic, car emissions or industrial chemicals that have been spilled “accidentally.” Although California has passed some environmental reform, we still have not challenged pollution that comes from our consumer culture and overuse of automobiles.

Oftentimes, wildlife has to cope with such man-made pollution.  At the marina, I saw an airborne crow hurl an oyster at the asphalt in order to crack its shell. Later, during low tide on the mudflats, I saw a murder of crows feeding on the shellfish inside a big rig tire pitted in the sand. Although birds are resourceful, trash poses a danger to them. The Laysan albatross, for example, will eat lethal man-made waste instead of food. Researchers find their carcasses in the sand; rib cages stuffed with plastic goods and feathers. Birds and fish will digest plastic pellets, which — according to the Algalita Research Foundation — may contain up to 1 million times the amount of pesticides as their ambient water. Meanwhile, sandpipers and snowy egrets forage near the mouth of Strawberry Creek, which, like our other creeks, has been turned into tunnels and gutters.

In spite of our dilapidated system of environmental governance, California has passed some powerful legislation. Proposition 84 is funding the development of metrics, machines and a public database for small-scale trash interception. Cities statewide are required to develop Climate Action Plans, which specifically lay out how they will resist and adapt to climate change. Yet this is only the beginning of what we need to do to help restore the environment.

The same body of internationally inspired empirical research on the shortcomings of American health care and economic systems ought to also be levied against regressive urban development. In Tokyo, every tree has a “doctor.” In France, according to planner Lucie Laurian, the right to live in a “balanced environment” with due respect for health is a constitutional right on par with the human rights of 1789 and the welfare rights of 1946. In Copenhagen, planners are collaborating to make their city carbon-neutral by 2025. With similar focus and energy, we as a state need to pioneer environmental development and restoration.

We need to rework water rights and chemically intensive farming. We need to rethink the use of plastics in general (not just for lattes and grocery bags). We need to reroute the way hundreds of thousands of us travel to the same places in the same region, daily and separately.

Modernization has altered our natural landscape in Berkeley. Instead of flowing from a corridor of willows, Strawberry Creek flows from a sewer into the mudflats, where birds feed during low tide. Strawberry Creek, and all our other creeks, should run in daylight as far as possible from the hills to the bay. For now, it doesn’t. It won’t. As long as we let each city live up to its own weak set of environmental standards, the birds will have to keep out of the rain.

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @urbananimale.

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I was stuck in an elevator in Barrows for 88 minutes — and then there was a fireball on campus.

It wasn’t as scary as it sounds, except for those two seconds in the elevator when I misunderstood the student worker who was helping us and thought she was informing us of the possibility that we may plummet to our deaths. Someone finally came to help us, and I acquired the skill of knowing how to open an out-of-order elevator door. I jumped onto the fourth floor, finally leaving that box that constituted our world for 88 minutes (not to be dramatic or anything), and soon after I left the building, I got a call from a friend telling me to get as far away from campus as possible, right away, because there had just been an explosion near California Hall.

You know this by now. The news is all over the Internet. Within hours, a page popped up on my Facebook suggesting I buy a shirt that said, “I Survived Explosive Midterms — Cal 2013.” There are memes and pictures showing how studious we Berkeley students are; my favorite is the image of a sea of students’ faces in a dark classroom, half illuminated by their iPhone screens, scribbling away, completely unaware of the chaos that was about to break out around them.

I was heading down Bancroft when I got the call, and the panic in his voice made me turn to my right. The big gray cloud that from afar I thought was fog turned out to be smoke from the fire that had just erupted. I got to Telegraph and Durant and watched the masses of students anxiously walking or sprinting across the street, everyone glancing back at the disarray behind. The sirens occupied the surrounding air with their shrieks as the campus blinked with the fire trucks’ lights. A general sense of panic seemed to be spreading throughout Sproul Plaza.

My friends came out, and we stared at the smoky sky, wondering whether we would have class tomorrow (of course we did) and whether this meant any deadlines we had would be pushed (of course they weren’t). As I looked up at the Berkeley sky, I had a flashback: It’s July, and I’m standing right outside the Syrian border, staring up at the half-Turkish, half-Syrian sky. I am listening to a man tell me about the rumor going around that said that the camp we worked at will be bombed soon. “So keep looking up at the sky like you do, and run away from explosions, OK?”

I nod yes and keep my eyes glued on my beloved country’s clear blue sky, decorated with wispy white streaks. I wondered what my reaction would be if I saw a plane approaching: Would I freeze, or would I shout and start running? And then I thought, would running even help me? A feeling of helplessness slowly trickled throughout my body and gradually took over. My brain seemed to place me in someone else’s shoes, subjected me to someone else’s emotions, someone who is watching a bomb fall down on her country, her city, her house, herself.

It is painful, knowing thousands have had to answer the question of whether running is beneficial. It is even more painful knowing those people and I shared the same nationality, the same land.

I stood on that corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, watching students rush toward my side of the street, and thought, this is a small glimpse of what it must be like to be in my country. My friend, commenting on the excitement of the day and explaining why he so desperately needed a drink, said, “An explosion. That doesn’t happen every day.”

But it does. It is happening every day. And it’s not because wiring was stolen but because people are purposefully dropping bombs on others. And it really is horrible that some of our fellow Berkeley students were hurt, and all of our prayers are going out to them. But I want to point out that my fellow citizens are not only hurt but are dying, on a daily basis. In their homes, their schools, everywhere.

The explosion in Berkeley reminded me — not that I needed a reminder — of what drives me to be here, the reason I listen to professors talk about human rights and conflict-management strategies. Everyday life in Berkeley, whether it’s another normal day or a huge-fireball-on-campus kind of day, speaks of Syria to me.

It’s as Walt Whitman said,

“I was looking a long while for Intentions,

For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for these

chants — and now I have found it,

It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither

accept nor reject,)

It is no more in the legends than in all else,

It is in the present — it is this earth to-day.”

The post An explosion here and bombs there appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Hey Megaphone,

This doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, it makes me feel crazy. Sometimes I dream that my boyfriend did something, but I’m mad at him when I wake up in real life. I dream that he’s cheating on me or planning to break up with me. I know it isn’t really happening, but I can’t get over it for a couple of hours, usually. So I ignore his texts or avoid him until I feel better. What can I do to get over this?

Sincerely,

Living A Nightmare

Your problem is actually pretty common, LAN, if that makes you feel any less crazy. Eventually, someone you know will show up in your dream. He or she wears the wrong face, says the wrong thing, uses the wrong name, but you know who it is. Sometimes the villain of the story will be your current partner.

Author Pat Conroy said dreams are the love letters and hate mail of the subconscious. That’s actually a pretty good way to think about it. You know how love letters are made mostly out of air and frustrated sexuality and hope and promises you’re never going to keep? Right. And consider that hate mail is generally written by people who have too much time on their hands and spend it fixating on a celebrity and distorting reality and cutting all those letters out of newspapers. Your dreams are no different. Nightmares take cut-up little pieces of news and truth and ephemera and random things you see in passing and then paste them into paper dolls to play in the theater in your mind. It is a tale told by your neurochemistry, full of beer and pizza, signifying nothing.

The really crazy part is that sometimes these dreams actually signify something. One study published by the New York times that 33 percent of people had had a dream once that had come true. Sometimes the pieces your mind has cut out of reality look really familiar. If you’re dreaming that your boyfriend left you for a pearl-diving octogenarian wearing the uniform of the Israeli Defense Forces, it’s probably just hate mail. If you’re dreaming that your boyfriend is spending too much time with your roommate, and she smiles a little too knowingly sometimes, and you wake to find that she’s wearing his hoodie, then maybe your dreams are trying to tell you something.

Throw out the dream dictionary, LAN. Forget the flying dogs and the door that wouldn’t open. Listen to your gut. Are you really upset at the dream, or are you upset because the dream is a window into a part of your mind you’re trying to ignore? Remember, your subconscious is both much smarter and much crazier than you are. Let it guide you, but keep it on a leash.

Dream on,

Meg

Contact Meg at megaphone@dailycal.org to have your personal questions answered anonymously by the Megaphone. 

The post Living a nightmare appeared first on The Daily Californian.

What in the world have we gotten ourselves into?

On Oct. 1, the government shut down, furloughing 800,000 federal employees and forcing tens of thousands of other workers, including prison guards, air traffic controllers and U.S. Border Patrol agents to work without pay.

And we aren’t too far from another crisis — this time of far greater magnitude. As early as Oct. 17, the federal government could hit its borrowing cap of $16.7 trillion, causing the government to default on 40 percent of its obligations. If it does come to that, the government will have to choose which services — Medicare, Social Security, interest on debt, education, courts, the FBI, food safety inspections — it will fund.

A government shutdown means the government will be unable to take on future obligations. Hitting the debt ceiling would make it unable to repay past obligations.

We’ve already got the former. Parks are being shut down. Most of NASA has closed. Workers are being held without pay. But if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, we’ll be in a much worse place. The government will owe money to creditors that it won’t be able to repay, likely causing a financial crisis on the order of billions of dollars. It certainly won’t be pretty.

There’s a long list of people that we can blame. Is it the Republicans, who are holding a government hostage over a single policy they dislike? Is it the Democrats, who seem to be unable to compromise on an unpopular policy they forced through Congress? Or  is it us, the voters, who elected them in the first place?

This time, it’s hard to blame anybody but the Republicans for the government shutdown. Instead of being another comprehensive policy bill, the spending bill that should have been passed before Oct. 1 would have just upheld the status quo. It would be like so many other boring bills that Congress passes on a daily basis to keep itself and the government running. But instead of passing the spending bill now and working with the president on Obamacare later, the Republicans decided to use the day-to-day operations of the government as leverage to try and force their own agenda onto the White House.

It’s a strategy that has been used before, 17 years ago, by Newt Gingrich and the then-Republican-controlled Congress. Just like the Republicans today, the Republicans in 1995 thought that the government was spending too much money and that its size needed to be reduced. And, just like the Republican leadership today, Newt Gingrich decided the best way to force Clinton to cut down on programs was to use the debt ceiling and the spending bill as leverage. It didn’t work out very well.

Clinton’s approval ratings rose to 53 percent after the first shutdown of the government — the highest those ratings had been for two years. The public largely blamed the Republicans for the shutdown, and they lost the ensuing 1996 presidential election by an electoral college margin of 159-379, a landslide victory for Clinton.

In the same way, the current Republican strategy of using the government shutdown as a political tactic is nothing short of pointless. Obama has already said he would not sign anything but a clean spending bill without any amendments that would delay the implementation of Obamacare. At the same time, House Republican leaders seem unwilling to pass a spending bill with anything but amendments regarding Obamacare. It may seem like a classic case of partisanship, but in this case, Obama stands firmly in the right.

On “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart compares the Republicans to a losing football team that says, “If you don’t give us 25 points on Monday, we will shut down the NFL.” And Stewart is correct. The spending bill is part of the everyday running of our government. Like the regular raising of the debt ceiling, it’s something that we expect to be passed each and every year in order to keep our government functioning. And yet the Republicans seem to be willing to put everything in jeopardy in order to thumb their noses at Obama’s policies.

Regardless of the eventual outcome of the government shutdown, the temper tantrum the Republicans are throwing over Obamacare needs to come to a stop. The Republican leadership will need to learn that negotiations take place when both parties come to a level playing field, not when one party is holding the government hostage over a piece of legislation. And the Republicans will need to learn their lesson fast — before the country hits its debt ceiling — or there will be an entire new set of problems.

It’s the Republicans’ call now. The ball is in their court.

Contact Kevin Gu at kgu@dailycal.org.

The post Republicans are the ones to blame appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Leather and latex cover some parts of the bodies at Folsom, but not the parts that society typically asks of clothing.

Some folk are bound by rope and chain — others are led by their partner by collar and leash, often wearing full-head leather masks. A woman’s limbs are arranged artistically via rope and knots before she is suspended by hooks, her bound breasts turning slightly purple. She grins wolfishly as the fellow who tied her up pinches a nipple, and she kisses him upside-down — he grips her hair in a show of both force and devotion. A beautiful transvestite rocks a lace bra and knee-high leather boots. A naked man in a ski mask stands in a window on the third floor of his apartment and jacks off what might be the largest erect dick I’ve ever seen. The crowd on the street erupts in cheers when, 15 minutes later, he cums.

These are a few of the scenes I was fortunate enough to be privy to at the Folsom Street Fair last Sunday. For those unfamiliar, FSF is an annual leather and BDSM — Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism — street fair. BDSM practitioners enjoy a myriad toys and methods, many of which I saw at FSF. But for all the variety in sexual preferences — from butt plugs that had horse tails, aerial suspensions via rope and so forth — there was one thing that all the people I saw held in common: smiles. No matter whether the party was a dom — the dominant member in a BDSM relationship — in spiked heels or a sub — the submissive — in a full-face leather dog mask, a totally naked middle-aged man getting his ass whipped cherry-red or a plainly clothed average human walking through the fair, everyone was having a good time bringing bedroom preferences to the daylight or simply watching others do so.

Nearly no one I saw was intoxicated. No one did anything to anyone without explicit consent: Nearly all the sexual activity — be it flogging, spanking or stroking — was between people who already knew each other or was within the bounds of set-up booths. I felt entirely comfortable the entire time. There I was, surrounded by people who were so open, honest and communicative about their sexuality that they chose to air it out in the sunshine. The feel of community and adventure was buzzing in the air.

Oftentimes, people associate the images I painted at the beginning of this article with a sort of deviant, seedy subculture. Part of this is institutional. Older editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychologist’s bible for mental disorders, had listed paraphilia — an umbrella term for “unusual” sex desires like fetishes, BDSM and kink — as a mental disorder. But a Dutch study published last summer found that, of the survey’s participants, BDSM practitioners scored better on measures of mental well-being and the emotional security in relationships than those who only practice “vanilla” sex. Granted, the participants self-selected into the study, so the results may not be representative of society as a whole, but it was still a refreshing shout against the historical villainization of BDSM. And maybe the sort of communication necessary for BDSM — regarding soft and hard limits, for example — does lend itself to healthier relationship skills.

BDSM is simply a personal preference, not an expression of some dark personality twist or abusive history (as with the hero of Fifty Shades of Gray, Christian Grey). The newest DSM does make the distinction between “atypical” behaviors and mental diseases involving those “atypical” behaviors, which is a solid step toward appreciating BDSM as just a personal preference. But I still think the wording is a bit problematic. What’s “typical” and “atypical” when it comes to your inexplicable carnal passions?

An incredible BDSM comic on DeviantArt by artist “Shiniez” said it best: “With sexuality being a taboo on a good day, deviations (have always been) observed with judgmental eyes. They took that small, personal aspect of one’s life, and put a spotlight on it. And under that spotlight sexuality cast an ugly shadow on the society and the society frowned upon it. But there were those who understood that it is a wonderful aspect of the human experience. Wonderful, exciting, intimate, sometimes a bit scary, and sometimes even a little funny.”

Human sexuality is a messy maelstrom of emotion, carnal passion and power plays. It will inevitably materialize differently based on individual tastes. You might not like BDSM. But you also might love it, and it doesn’t say anything seedy about you or suggest anything warped in your past or personality. The happy, loving and confident people I saw at FSF were an ardent testimony to that.

Vi Nguyen writes the Sex on Tuesday column. Contact her at sex@dailycal.org

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