Scripps Dinners, Party Weekends, and Mystery Flowers

Last week was pretty busy, and kind of stressful too. On top of having multiple tests to take and several important assignments due, I've been conducting zillions and zillions of interviews as part of my new job, so that's been going on all week as well.

My friends and I decided to get away from campus for dinner on Friday night, mostly in an effort to get away from the junk our dining hall tends to serve on Fridays. The four of us headed up to Scripps College for food and sat there talking until the dining hall staff turned out the lights on us, which we pretty much took as a cue to leave.

David picked a cherry blossom sprig on the walk to dinner. They were rather pretty. :)

In spite of intentions to go to bed early, we ended up going for a late-night walk around campus. On Friday night, our college hosted a concert by Lupe Fiasco, and aside from that there were a lot of parties going on. Needless to say, we ran into a lot of people who were not quite at their best. We even managed to catch a glimpse of one of our drunken contemporaries laying claim a light post. With his urine. Classy moment? Not so much.

A positive outcome of the excursion, though, was the discovery these beauties growing in one of the flower beds on the quad:

I have no idea what kind of flowers these are, but if anyone out there in the void does know, I'd definitely appreciate a heads-up!

After finding the lovely specimen above, I figured I wouldn't be buying flowers from the market this week. Of course, I was wrong. How could I have possibly passed these up?

Clearly, I couldn't resist. And why would I ever want to? These orchids are sitting on my desk in the bud vase that my mom cleverly devised from a broken olive oil drizzler. They're so lovely to look at that sometimes I'm almost sorry to get up from my desk after finishing my homework for the night. Almost, but not quite, of course.

Greenpeace

So Greenpeace wants to set aside 40% of the world's oceans as Marine Reserves in an effort to save the world from total destruction.

I can appreciate that. After all, it's pretty gross that we have mega-trash blobs floating in our oceans, some of which are bigger than Texas (ew), and it's pretty un-legit to be spewing toxic chemicals all over the place and killing the fishies and stuff. Yeah, ocean pollution sucks. It screws all of us (yes, Minamata Disease, I'm looking at you).

But I really don't understand how setting aside 40% of the oceans as "no-take" zones is going to help. I mean, after all, wouldn't ocean currents blow that all to hell anyway? Unless Greenpeace is being really strategic about the placement of these reserves and taking ocean currents into consideration (which, in all honesty, I'm not sure they are), any efforts they make will be moot because, hey, for every square mile of ocean where someone isn't polluting, there are two or even three square miles where someone else is. And since we can't very well set up walls in the middle of the ocean to keep these areas discrete, pollutants can just as well pass willy-nilly across these imaginary boundaries and we end up with gunk everywhere, just like before. How does it make sense to say that people can pollute in 'x' location but not 'y', when the two places are obviously connected by current flows?

I would have asked the toolish Greenpeace representative who stopped me on my way back to campus from the Farmer's Market this morning, but he seemed a little out of sorts. Our friend was under the impression that the Amazonian kangaroos were endangered because we were chopping down their precious Nabisco trees. Say what??

Maybe pollution shouldn't be the top priority on our Worry List. Maybe...maybe it should be dumb people.