Voices

Voices is the Op-Ed and personal essay section of The Georgetown Voice. It features the real narratives of diverse students from nearly every corner on campus, seeking to tell some of the incredibly important and yet oft-unheard stories that affect life in and out of Georgetown.

Voices

Letters to the Editor

“Creative expression is ageless”

I enjoyed spending time with reporters Chris Norton and Mary Katherine Stump during last weekend’s Georgetown Independent Film Festival-an annual venue celebrating creativity, originality and uninhibited personal expression.

By the October 2, 2003

Voices

The blunt end of the hurricane

When the lights went out, I was sitting on my couch, watching a Harrison Ford movie. In retrospect, I wish I had been up on the Village A rooftops catching Isabel full in the face. Instead, after a muddy round of tackle football, I retreated indoors, possibly due to my roommates’ infectious paranoia in the face of Mother Nature.

By the October 2, 2003

Voices

Last days of summer

The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai suggests in his analysis of the age of globalization that we can trace the international flow of identities and culture by following a particular good or idea. We can note each permutation and appropriation of that idea as a unique glimpse into the lives of global consumers.

By the September 25, 2003

Voices

A culinary renaissance

My personal and highly arbitrary definition of art is that it is something that brings the viewer or participant a little closer to the sacred that resides within the artist. When art was the subject of countless philosophers’ attentions, it was relegated to four basic spheres: visual, auditory, performative, and rhetorical.

By the September 25, 2003

Voices

Oh, Isabel

VOICES BY VANESSA MACHIR Let me explain something. I do not strip. I do not get naked. Unless nudity is an intrinsic requirement of a situation, the clothes stay on at all times. Not during the most aggressive heat strokes or my most embarrassingly drunken moments have I ever felt the urge to disrobe.

By the September 25, 2003

Voices

Letters to the Editor

I was disappointed to see Dave Stroup’s column on vouchers (“Vouching for D.C.,”News, Sept. 18) that amounted not only to a thinly veiled attack on school choice.

By September 25, 2003

Voices

My man wears a gorilla suit

VOICES BY ANNE GLIDDEN Each week, one of my favorite activities is to read the “I Saw You” section of the Washington City Paper. Admittedly, it’s a rather dorky way to celebrate the passing of yet another week, but I do enjoy ordering my overpriced Evil Empire from Uncommon Grounds and cozying up with the City Paper.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

Fear mongering is my anti-drug

Like most first-years coming to Georgetown, I had a difficult time adjusting to college life. I was nervous about making new friends and being in a different environment. I was beset by problems and self-doubt; my parents had just been brutally murdered and, worst of all, I was fat.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

The great Bengali monsoon wedding

There is a scene in Mira Nair’s film, Monsoon Wedding, where the bridegroom asks his fianc?, handpicked by his parents, about the odd similarity between an arranged marriage and a “love match?” “Well, how much more risky can this arranged marriage thing be from meeting one night in a noisy and smoky bar and hooking up?” he asks.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

Letter to the Editor

I want to congratulate Rob Anderson and Mike DeBonis on their centerfold article on the Southwest Quadrangle (“Our campus, our space,” Cover, Sept. 11). It is well written and shows considerable knowledge of architecture. And I laughed out loud when I read, “If God is in the architectural details, Georgetown lost its faith long ago.

By the September 18, 2003

Voices

The war on sharing

VOICES BY DAVE STROUP This Tuesday signified a landmark victory for copyright integrity and intellectual property security worldwide. The Recording Industry Association of America settled with Brianna LaHara, a resident of a Manhattan housing project. Like many who fall between the cracks of society and turn to crime, LaHara led a double life. By day, she attended middle school and was on the honor roll. By night, she was one of the nation’s most wanted music pirates.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Letter to the Editor

I find it ironic that Dave Stroup’s Sept. 4 article “D.C. on Speed” appears in the same issue as an article regarding an injury to a fellow student due to a careless and speeding driver (“Student hit by Mercedes SLK,” News). While I take issue with Stroup’s factually and legally unfounded assertion that Attorney General Ashcroft is hiding “cameras in smoke detectors,” it is his closing editorialization-”the system is flawed”-that is inappropriate in a news article.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Correction

In “A boathouse at last?” (Cover, Sept. 4), the statement, “Various planning and historic preservation groups, such as the Old Georgetown Board, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the Georgetown Waterfront Commission and the National Capital Planning Commission, gave their enthusiastic approval to the boathouse plans,” is incorrect.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Our worsening body image

Cultural elites-and by elites I basically mean yuppies-love to compete. Some might say that’s why they’re rich. You go to Georgetown, so you’ve probably noticed this. They compete for everything. Schools, grades, clothes, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, rings, rocks, cars, apartments, starter mansions, pets, children, and finally schools for their children.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Dumb and Dubya

The President of the United States, George W. Bush, is not blessed with “darn good intelligence,” and I’m not talking about the CIA reports he was given. That’s right, he is not a smart man. The most common reaction to the above assertion goes something like this: “That’s not true.

By the September 11, 2003

Voices

Style versus substance

You’re a little hungry. What’s the first thing you think of? New South, but that was last year. This year’s first-years will never have to experience our spectacular old dining hall with its one-way-in, one-way-out door, long lines and dirty, sticky floors.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

More trite senior nostalgia

VOICES by IAN BOURLAND The rhetoric of official university statements, student-group campaigns and mass e-mails has always tended to ring hollow for me, as my eyes glide uncomprehending past assurances of the strength of our traditions and bonds as an intellectual and interpersonal community.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

Gone and forgotten

Jon Sarasuak kontatzen dizkio Andoni Egan?ari Ixil-en artean bizitako batzuk Zozoak Beleari liburuan. In all likelihood, you do not recognize this language. If you do, you are one of twelve speakers of Itz? left in the world today. The Guatemalan language of Itz? is one of four hundred and seventeen languages classified as nearly extinct.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

Celebrating the return of irony

After Sept. 11 2001, one pundit claimed that the stark presentation of good (courageous firefighters) versus evil (you know who), and its rude reminder of that seemingly forgotten but rather grave matter of “life and death”, brought to America “the end of the age of irony.

By the September 4, 2003

Voices

The inherent merit of ideas

Consider the word respect. Respect conjures an acceptance of ideas and concepts, of allowing each to share an idea. Likewise, respect entails constructive criticism, even going so far as to (gasp!) say that another’s idea may be wrong. Tolerating respect does not change the veracity of the idea; it merely puts forth another’s opinion of it.

By the August 28, 2003