1. Be sure to watch out for food patrol in Moffitt. You know those people with the white plastic bags and walkie talkies? They’re out for your cookies and Red Bull! They’re usually pretty loud getting off the elevator to start their sweep for goodies, so stash ‘em before they have to confiscate. If you catch them in a good mood they may let you finish off your drink before tossing it, but to be on the safe side just keep everything gulpable and/or munchable out of sight.

2. Be strategic when ‘studying’ with friends. If you can all manage to sit around the same table without splitting into peals of giggles about that latest Facebook hack, by all means congregate to work. If you lack the willpower (as most of us do), finding a cubicle or some other secluded area to hunker down in for a couple of hours is probably a better strategy. Once you’ve gotten some solid work done, then you can take a social media break. Trust us, they’ll be much more satisfying. And you’ll get a lot less glares from people who don’t have headphones to tune you out with.

3. Pack provisions. If you’re planning on camping out for a while, bring a sweater if you’re sensitive to the cold (Moffitt and Main Stacks are freezing at night!) and money and food so that you don’t have to trek back and forth between the library and your dorm room or apartment.

We lied, there’s one more thing:

4. STAY SANE. The library does crazy things to your brain if you stay there for too long. You’ll start to forget what sleeping in a bed feels like and that when the sun goes down the day is supposed to end. We know we told you to pack stuff with you, but be sure to get some fresh air between hitting the books and acing those finals! It’ll all be worth it when summer rolls around … in less than a week!

Good luck everybody!

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

The post How to: behave in the library during finals week appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Was it cold?

We all know that Berkeley at night can be a pretty chilly place. And if we get cold even without our jackets, you’d think that running stark naked anywhere on campus would leave you absolutely frigid. Well, something about Main Stacks during the Naked Run defies this logic. Not a single runner was shivering, and even spectators were taking off their coats! Because a massive swarm of hot bodies obviously produces more warmth than Doe’s heating system does, we suggest that the engineering department incorporate this finding into a more “green” Berkeley thermostat.

Were you drunk?

Unveiling your naked body to a hoard of strangers can be pretty stressful, so the Clog wondered whether any runners took a shot or two before the big event to calm their nerves. While some participants may have slipped under our radar, we found that the vast majority did not drink at all before disrobing. One runner, a seven-time veteran of the Naked Run, explained that the “high” he gets from dashing completely nude through a library is all-consuming, and he would hate to taint the liberating experience with the fog of alcohol.

What’d you do with your clothes?

Completely unburdened during their journey, most of the runners showed no traces of having arrived to Main Stacks fully clothed. Naturally, we wondered where they stashed their garments. The Clog discovered three main strategies. The most prepared runners temporarily trusted their clothes to supportive friends in the spectator crowd. Slightly less confident in their friends, others donned backpacks containing their valuables during the run. Finally, the most spontaneous participants stowed their clothes randomly in corners of Main Stacks — we even spotted a pile of pants on the spiral staircase!

Were you afraid?

Most runners, attracted to the sense of community and exhilaration, did not seem to fear revealing their bodies to strangers. However, a number expressed concern about the pictures and videos taken by spectators during the event. Donning pirate masks, face paint and even paper bags, many runners dodged this risk and showcased their creativity at the Naked Run this year.

Would you do it again?

Whether a seven-time veteran or a senior crossing the Naked Run off her bucket list, everybody we talked to expressed a desire to do it again. The juxtaposition of intense, stoic studiers and carefree, jubilant naked bodies is something we’ll probably only experience during our years at Cal.

Regardless of whether you ever decide to participate in the Naked Run, the Clog encourages you to do something fun this week. We know you won’t study for the entire 216 hours of dead week. Try a new running route. Go see “The Great Gatsby.” Get lunch with a friend. As proven by the continuing tradition of the Naked Run, a little excitement can definitely enhance our studying and the quality of our dead week memories.

Contact Katherine Velicki at kvelicki@dailycal.org.

The post Disrobing the mysteries of the Naked Run appeared first on The Daily Californian.

1. Sunbathe. The skies have been gray for the past few days, but the forecast predicts some sun in the next two weeks. Bring your books out to Memorial Glade and soak up some vitamin D in between reviewing chapters. Rest your eyes and enjoy the sunlight with the grass beneath you and the bells of the Campanile ringing in the distance.

2. Play sardines outside. Hear us out on this one. Once you’ve had enough lounging around outside, get some friends together for a game of sardines! For those of you not familiar with sardines, it’s basically hide-and-seek backwards. One person hides, and everyone else looks for them. When someone discovers the “hider,” he or she hides alongside that person. This continues until one poor soul is out looking by themselves. This is especially fun after dark.

3. Play hide-and-seek in the library. Similar to our last idea, this is also tons of fun! Gather a group of friends and go to a library like Main Stacks or Moffitt with lots of shelves and places to hide behind. After that, you know the rules! You’ll have to be careful not to disturb fellow students in the library who aren’t taking a break, so make it a quiet game. We’re not trying to get you kicked out! But this is a good way to make the library look less terrible and gloomy. And think of all the possibilities with those moving shelves in Main Stacks! (Just don’t crush anyone. Please. Safety first.)

4. Conduct social experiments. Experiment with people on Sproul. Will people walk you with their umbrella if it’s raining and you have none? Lend you some paper? Let you use their phone? Stop and answer your questions about a class? See how nice people really are at this school. Or, if you have more faith in your theatrical skills, have a (loud) emotional breakdown in the middle of heavy foot traffic and see who stops to ask if you’re okay. You could even record yourself and make a YouTube video! After finals are over, of course. We at the Clog would love to see that.

5. Exercise. This might be the most boring and predictable of the lot, but it’s a legitimate option for those who still want to be productive during their time away from the books. Walk around campus. Jog. Do lunges across Memorial Glade. Find a secluded spot like the eucalyptus grove and do pushups and crunches. Use the beautiful outdoor space for something productive while taking time to unwind and let go of all that pent-up stress. Added bonus? You’ll be getting a head start on those summer abs.

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailcal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

The post 5 things to do on campus besides studying appeared first on The Daily Californian.

These block figures — the square-shouldered man and the triangle dress-wearing woman — have been present in our minds since the earliest days of childhood. We were taught somewhere along the line that there exists a binary in the world and that it is used to separate people when using the restroom.

Fortunately, at UC Berkeley, male and female demarcations are constantly met with opposition. Others have written in the past about the need for greater gender-neutral and gender non-conforming spaces on campus, so it is a topic that will not be tackled here. At this point, such a need is not even an argument. The only question that remains is “when?”

What is equally important, I think, is casting away the notion that gender should be the main aspect of identity. Like the anarchist woman bathroom sign, your identity is so much more than your sex or gender. You might relate to the stereotypes of tomboy, effeminate guy, girly girl or butch male, but those designations signify nothing about who you are as a person. These labels mean less and less as time passes. Further, the sex a person is born with or without no longer impacts potential careers or positions in society to the same degree as it once did, at least in this country. All of this is good news.

But as gender loses its fundamental role in how we identify and how others see us, what do we have left to understand ourselves?

Simply put, our identity should be regarded as the sum of our actions. You aren’t the set of traits that you were born with. You are not a list of potentials or probabilities. You are whatever you choose to become — a notion that extends far past gender into the realms of ethnicity and class too. I’m not trying to take on the world with this idea. Heck, I’m sure millions before me have thought it. But regardless of its originality, the concept that we should consider ourselves born with a tabula rasa is key to progressive thinking. Identity that is nurtured, not inherent to our nature, is the identity of the future.

Some have trouble accepting this, usually in minor ways. This past weekend, during an apartment viewing that my two roommates and I attended, we had asked the landlord if parking were available. “Why do you have cars?” he asked, “It’s the boys who need the cars. Girls don’t drive cars.” He then went on to say that we must come from very spoiled families. I kid you not — this actually happened.

Such comments can easily be dismissed because he was an older man and maybe only half-serious. Annoying as it was, small battles are not the ones to be fought at a time like this. While this country might see him as being behind the times, the problems other nations face in terms of societal gender roles are much more pressing.

These days, at least in Berkeley, no one wears triangle dresses like the one worn by every women-designated bathroom sign. A shift in identifying ourselves by our actions and accomplishments — not the qualities we’re born with — is something to be celebrated where it exists and encouraged where it is nascent.

Contact Kimberly Veklerov at kveklerov@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @kveklerov.

The post Stalled identity crisis appeared first on The Daily Californian.

ThinkPlace allows students to find a comprehensive catalog of libraries and cafes around Berkeley. Listing all 29 campus libraries and more than 50 locations in all, the site provides hours, addresses and descriptions of amenities of each study location, such as the number of outlets and amount of elbow room.

“The way the modern student works is not just at home at a desk,” said Director of Academic Technology Warren McQuinn, who works in the Office of the AAVP. “You go wherever fits you best at the moment, and … there are more people doing that now than ever before.”

Before launching the site, the ThinkPlace subcommittee scoped out each location and took pictures to contribute to the website. The site launched last December during Reading, Review and Recitation Week and received 3,000 hits, according to McQuinn.

The website was created as a short-term solution for the problem of limited study spaces on campus, said Deputy of Academic Services Yevgeniy Pilipovskiy, who also works in the Office of the AAVP.

Especially during finals season, prime study locations such as the Student Learning Center, Moffitt Library and Gardner Main Stacks are often overcrowded with students vying for limited desk space.

“We didn’t feel like people had enough information on where they could study,” Pilipovskiy said.

The ThinkPlace team members said they plan to expand the website and make it more student-friendly with features such as the Seven Wonders of Berkeley, which will showcase the best study spots in Berkeley. The team also plans on creating ThinkPlace awards that will highlight the best coffee shops in town.

“We want to make (the website) laid-back and casual,” Gavello said. “That’s the goal.”

As it continues to develop, ThinkPlace will become more interactive, expanding on its current Facebook comment feature and creating a recommendation engine so that students can bookmark their favorite places.

Gavello said she hopes that ThinkPlace will gain more student attention with its Facebook page and Instagram account and that the website will become a convenient resource for students who want to find more study places around Berkeley.

“I’m a freshman, so I didn’t really know about all the study places,” said Internal Coordinator for the ThinkPlace subcommittee CheYeon Hyun. “But after working with ThinkPlace, I’ve realized that there are so many great places you can go to to study.”

In addition to ThinkPlace, during her time as AAVP, Gavello has worked to make the Student Learning Center open 24 hours a day. She said she is also hoping to make Moffitt Library open 24 hours a day before the end of her term.

Contact Jennie Yoon at jyoon@dailycal.org.

The post Website allows students to explore new study spots appeared first on The Daily Californian.

In response to the spring 2012 “Sex on campus: actually doable?” column, yes — having sex on campus is actually very doable, and it’s lots of fun. It’s also surprisingly easy.

That particular column brought up concerns about not getting to “finish” when doing it in a public place. Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough to have goal-oriented sex, but sex isn’t always about cumming and having orgasms. Sometimes it’s for shits and giggles. Having expectations and goals can ruin the fun of it. Besides, it’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying. Keep this in mind should you ever attempt sex on campus.

I’ve always had the cliched fantasy of having sex in Main Stacks, so we wasted no time in heading there first. The trick to doing it in Stacks is to go at a time when there won’t be a lot of people studying at the same time and to pick a section of books that people won’t ever think to look up. Like the British Royal Academy archives.

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck. We moved the adjacent shelves to block our location so that we couldn’t be seen from the rows on either side. I liked having our shelves of choice close to each other so that the setting was nice and cozy.

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up. You can even re-enact the awesome sex scene from the film Atonement. I definitely love a man who can fuck well while standing up.

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it. It’s fun to challenge yourself to not make any noise while having sex. There were two instances in which people walked by the shelves between which my partner and I were going at it hard-core. It was like a game — having to frantically put our clothes back on and immediately pretending to be interested in the data collections of the European Union while panting and giggling hysterically.

For a place to have loud ass-slapping sex, the classrooms in the dungeons of Moffitt served us well after Main Stacks because the ground floor of Moffitt was completely deserted. It felt great to have sex in a classroom that I used to hate sitting in for hours without cellphone reception.

Doing role play involving a student-teacher or GSI in a classroom like this one is LEGIT. It gives you an idea of how fantastic it would be if your hot GSI pounded you on the front desk every time you forgot to turn in a homework assignment.

The next building I chose to desecrate with my perverse ways was Wurster, which happens to be my least favorite building after Evans. Something I learned that day that blew my mind is that there are classrooms in Wurster that lock. With all that privacy, I had just as much fun banging as I did walking around classrooms in lingerie and writing dirty things on chalkboards.

For those whose bucket lists include the item “have sex on campus,” the inspirational message from my classy afternoon is: Just do it. You might find that it’s senior year already and that you never took advantage of all those lunch hours, Saturday nights and Wednesdays before Thanksgiving during which there were probably very few people in the libraries or buildings on campus.

Don’t be scared. Make the screw session worth getting caught, and remember that you are definitely not the first person to have had sex on campus, nor will you be the last.

Other than providing fun places to get down, Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognize the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few.

Learn to appreciate your sexy side and experience a few frisky things during your time here. Take the Female Sexuality DeCal, have sex in Morrison, do the naked run and talk to people who are willing to share their personal experiences. The wide acceptance and freedom of open sexual expression are among the greatest legacies we have the opportunity to uphold at this university.

Contact Nadia Cho at sex@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter: @nadiiacho.

The post College sex: Berkeley edition appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The Gardner Main Stacks and Moffitt Library will be open 24 hours a day starting today and until Sunday, Dec. 11, as they fill up with students who find creative ways to remain studying there.

In past years, committed students have brought suitcases filled with clothing and a desktop computer, and one even sneaked in a live bird, according to Alina Christian, night shift manager at Doe Library.

“We went downstairs (in Main Stacks,) and there was a chicken running around,” Christian said.

After that discovery last spring, Doe Library staff had to catch the bird and clean up its droppings.

Library staff are still unsure why the bird was in the building but assume it was a prank.

In order to spend longer hours at the library, some students bring in large meals. Whole pizzas have been spotted, and in the past year, a student even brought a rice cooker, according to Christian.

“He had rice, so I’m assuming it worked,” said Morgan Hulsey, a student library employee at Doe.

According to Christian, students often sleep on the library’s floor, rest on book racks or curl into individual cubicles to nap.

Additionally, breaks during the dead week can range from talking to friends to even sexual intercourse.

Condoms have been found in the library study halls, proof of intimate relations between the books, according to Hulsey.

Small confrontations also occur among students who spend long hours in the library, according to Sonya Williams, a employee in the security department for the campus libraries.

“People argue about space, saying ‘you took my space’ or ‘I was here first,’” Williams said.

Experienced Doe staff are largely cavalier about most of the happenings during dead week, but some events, such as the naked run, still have the power to surprise them.

“Afterwards, there was sequins and glitter everywhere,” Christian said regarding last year’s run.
Just across Memorial Glade, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library remains peaceful, according to Bruce Williams, the library’s reference services coordinator.

“Even the homeless people who come here are really well behaved,” Williams said. “It’s just a different group of people.”

Regardless of where they study, students will continue to invent ways to occupy the library in order to get their studying done.

Yufan Dong, a freshman, has already started studying for her finals but only plans to bring study materials with her into the library.

“Finals have got me stressed — I’m actually planning to go to the library every day next week and stay until I’m too tired to function,” she said.

The post Students develop obscure study habits in library when stressed appeared first on The Daily Californian.