We’re already moving full steam 

into the new semester, but I don’t 
think I’ve fully recovered from the 
previous one. Part of me wants to 
forge ahead and never look back at 
any part of 2020, but things don’t 
suddenly change when the clock 
strikes midnight, and the debris from 
the catastrophic year still lingers 
everywhere. It lingers in the unease 
and the discomfort of upending 
my first year of college. It lingers 
in my detached concept of home 
since we got sent back last March. 
And it lingers in my diminished 
sense of self caused by the agonizing 
purgatory that was quarantine. I 
know better than to think that the 
new year will change any of that, so 
here’s to looking back and finding 
comfort in the chaos of an otherwise 
cruel semester — to rediscovering 
what home feels like, above South 
University Avenue. 

As the last weeks of August 

approached, it was finally time to 
come back to Ann Arbor. It felt like 
coming back to life. After a six-month 
long haze, I was back to the most city-
life experience my small suburban-
upbringing self had known. And here 
I’d stay for the semester, in my room 
on the 16th floor of my apartment 
building. It was my cramped little 
space that allowed me to catch my 
breath for the first time in months. 
Things were different now. I was 
different. But the essence of my 
college coming-of-age was imminent. 
As the brilliant colors of the sunset 
faded into the first night of my 
post-quarantine freedom, I looked 
through my living room window to 
the street below. A line had begun 
to form outside of Brown Jug, and 
friends stumbled around, linked at 
the arms and masked up. That was 
the beginning of my infatuation with 
the eccentric character of South 
University Avenue. 

The semester would go on like 

this, and the weekend bustle would 
start as early as Wednesday, due to 
asynchronous schedules brought 
about by a new normal. 8 o’clock 
would bring the earliest sounds of 
soft laughter and music seeping 
through our windows, signifying the 
end of Zoom calls and the beginning 
of something more familiar. During 
a normal semester, I would be on 
my way to the UGLi for late hours 
of studying, but a long day of screens 
calls for more frequent breaks and 
new nightly routines. In time, my 
roommates and I took comfort 
in living vicariously through the 
people that walked down South U 
— it filled the void that came with 
missing out on what were supposed 
to be the best nights of our lives, in 
the name of public health safety. 
From above, we would drink along 
with the carousers, crafting the 
most ridiculous stories about those 
we saw and heard 16 floors down. 
Down there, that was Trish. With 
a skip in her step, she was on her 
way to meet up with the guy from 
class she kept pinned on her 11 a.m. 
Chemistry Zoom screen. She found 
home in romanticizing even the 
most reckless first dates.

On nights when Pizza House 

take-out was calling my name, I’d 
stay outside a bit longer, taking in 
the spirited characters of the street. 
From the rare political bar fights to 
the two people waiting outside of 
Champs Liquor Store standing too 
close to be just friends, I found home 
within the strangers that roamed 
South U. And slowly but surely, the 
deep disquiet of the past six months 
started to fade.

And when night turned to day, 

the sidewalks would populate with 
skateboard heads and students 
looking for a place to study. I’d peer 
down through my bedroom window, 
questioning the need for a sweatshirt 
in the early September morning. 
A woman running in shorts and a 
group of boys walking in t-shirts 

discouraged the extra layers as I got 
ready to make my own trek across 
campus. In those couple of seconds I 
spent gazing into the daily activities 
of people on that street, I felt comfort. 
I felt comfort in knowing that no 
matter how difficult the semester 
would get, we were in it together: me 
and my window view of this city and 
its people. And maybe that’s what 
coming home feels like. 

I remember the mess that was 

our first week of classes: from 
clashing Zoom calls in the living 
room to the dynamic sounds of the 
powerful Graduate Employees’ 
Organization 
strikes 
further 

down the street. It felt surreal 
and chaotic. That week stood as 
a painfully accurate precedent 
for the months to come, and as 
October turned into November, 
I promptly sensed the aftermath 
of an experimental semester gone 
wrong. But even in the chaos, I 
felt at peace in the home I had 
created. With the new lockdown 
order across campus, the street 
that once had so many stories to 
tell was empty, and my routine 
gaze down had lifted higher to 
the LED-lit living rooms and 
newly-decorated Christmas trees 
in the windows of the high-rises 
across from us. Every square was 
a different color; every square 
was a different story. Now, 
midterms and finals were upon 
us, and there was no time for idle 
people-watching. Nevertheless, as 
night time approached and lights 
flickered on, I was reminded of my 
pact with the view of South U. 

It’s hard to find what home is 

when you’re still caught in between 
who you are and who you’re 
becoming — when your concept of 
home continues to evolve as you do — 
and it’s even harder with the added 
uncertainty of the inexhaustible 
pandemic. 

Michigan in Color

Iced Coffee, Four and Four

I’ve always ordered an iced 

coffee, four and four.

The sickly sweet drink has been 

my specialty since high school. It 
was a joke amongst anyone who 
knew me; they would pester me 
with well-meaning quips about 
the fact that every day, just like 
clockwork, I’d walk into class late 
with that predictable beverage in 
my hand. Even now, years after 
the fact, I can’t get myself to order 
anything else.

I’ve always been a creature 

of habit. My interests, routines, 
favorite 
songs 
and 
foods 

remained stagnant as the years 
went on. I never saw a problem 
with it –– these things brought 
me comfort, and I indulged in 
them for so long that they started 
to become mine. In my mind, I 
was defined by my unwaveringly 
long hair, unchanging music taste 
and steadfast coffee order. But 
this past year, I’ve felt a gnawing, 
incessant need to change. The 
familiarity began to feel less like a 
comfortable security blanket and 
more like a suffocating character 
flaw. I was petrified that years 
had gone by and I’d been standing 
completely still. 

Perhaps this fear was rooted 

in the fact that lately, everything 
has been changing. With so 
many things out of our control 
–– a shut-down world, the loss of 
family members and friends, our 
compromised routines and sense 
of normalcy –– familiarity feels 
foreign. We cut our quarantine 
bangs, rearrange the furniture 
in our rooms and look for ways 
to reinvent and seize control over 
lives that suddenly feel a little less 
vibrant. I’m no different. Rather 
than embracing my penchant 
for consistency, I felt an urgent 
desire to change something, 

anything, about myself. 

So instead of shuffling through 

the same Taylor Swift album I’ve 
listened to since freshman year 
of high school, I forced myself to 
listen to experimental post-punk 
records. I started to never use 
the same car air freshener scent 
twice. I tried (and failed) every 
15-day ab challenge, 15 times over. 
I took risks at the drive-thru, 
and feigned surprise when I 
hated the way that black coffee 
bitterly coated my tongue. 

My 
miniscule 
vies 
for 

spontaneity were rooted in this 
need to have changed in some way 
over the course of the past year. 
However, I’ve found that those 
small acts were disingenuous for 
me. The bizarre need to prove 
that I’ve evolved, as if such a feat 
is dictated by new hair or music, 
just convinced me that any of my 
“normals” made me boring and 

needed correcting. Even worse, it 
presupposed me as a static, two-
dimensional creature, discrediting 
the real change I’d made –– the 
kind I couldn’t immediately see.

That change, the gradual kind, 

sneaks up on you. I don’t think 
you realize it until it has already 
shifted your perspective and 
simply becomes you. For me, the 
change that I had been actively 
pursuing was happening all along, 
quietly and unsuspectingly. 

One day, that particular bad 

memory I could never speak 
about without crying no longer 
evoked tears when I told the story. 
One day, my friend off-handedly 
mentioned that she was so proud of 
how much I had matured, and that 
she’d noticed it over the past few 
months and never said anything. 
One 
day, 
the 
“end-of-the-

world” embarrassing moments 
and heartbreaking rejections I 
thought I could never get over 
began to take up less space in my 
mind, until I didn’t think about 
them at all. I had never noticed or 
appreciated this kind of change, 
but it’d been happening all along. 

I think that the pressure to 

have a new, exciting version of 
yourself to parade doesn’t require 
compromising the things we 
define ourselves by now, in fear 
of being boring. In some ways, I 
think that we are a new, exciting 
version of ourselves every day. 
Time necessitates change, and 
this change shapes us whether 
we like it or not. The things we 
learn and the experiences that 
strengthen us culminate silently, 
even if your coffee order has 
never changed or you’ve had the 
same favorite song since middle 
school. I realize that now and 
can appreciate the growth that 
I’ve made when I wasn’t even 
looking. 

Today, I ordered an iced 

coffee, four and four. I never 
liked black coffee anyway.

YASMINE SLIMANI

MiC Columnist

Semester above South U

EASHETA SHAH

MiC Columnist

Notifications are ruining my life

MARINA SUN
MiC Columnist

I have 997 unread emails. 188 texts 

to open. 2 Instagram direct messages 
about the latest viral food video. And 
I’m feeling overwhelmed. 

As the winter semester grinds to 

a start, I’ve realized that a malicious 
byproduct of virtual learning has 
emerged: 
notifications. 
Endless 

Facebook 
postings 
about 
club 

recruitment, classmates blurting their 
existential crisis in the 200+ person 
GroupMe, 
or 
automated 
Piazza 

Activity Digest emails –– I’m over 
it. And as a new semester welcomes 
an opportunity to start fresh, I’m 
coming in with a new perspective: 
Notifications are ruining my life. 

Notifications are skewing my self 

worth. I used to watch my Instagram 
like a hawk after posting a self-
indulgent picture, dragging my finger 
down the screen to refresh the like 
count, and believing so intently that 
off-red digital hearts could quantify 
my popularity or impact my personal 
happiness. There was something 
terrifyingly instant about the way 
a two-sentence update could make 

me feel like a sudden sensation or an 
invisible nobody, and with each glance 
at my phone I felt an increasing sense 
of anxiety to keep momentum with an 
ever-moving online atmosphere. 

Notifications are cluttering my 

digital and mental clarity. Even before 
the fall semester had begun, my 
newly created university email inbox 
was inundated with a never-ending 
avalanche of notifications. “Join our 
Physical Activity Study,” “Alumni 
Association Welcomes You” and 
“MPrint Maintenance Tomorrow” 
were amongst the endless stream of 
messages that occupied my digital 
space, and the sheer volume of niche 
information often overshadowed a 
rare important update from a professor 
or recruiting opportunity. Checking 
my email became an unappealing 
chore, as my mental disorganization 
simultaneously worsened with each 
increase in unread messages. 

Notifications are overwhelming 

my daily schedule. I nervously refresh 
application portals or my email inbox 
for hours, burning precious time while 
awaiting news of a club acceptance 
or internship application decision. 
Hours have genuinely been wasted 

this way, as any thoughts of other 
priorities or personal nourishment are 
pushed aside in favor of capturing the 
exact moment an update rolls onto the 
screen. I depend on notifications for 
validation, let them control my moods 
and watch helplessly as my personal 
connections dwindle until all I am left 
with is my own anxiety –– and that has 
to stop. 

Notifications are ruining my life, so 

this semester I’m turning them off. The 
emails, the texts, and yes –– even the 
Bachelor Twitter updates. I’ve been 
prioritizing connecting to the wrong 
network for too long, losing focus 
on my mental health and the simple 
benefits of human communication. 
Now I check my phone when I want 
to. If something is urgent, people will 
call. Suddenly the tense feeling in my 
shoulders has eased, and I experience 
a rare moment of control.

I don’t know how many emails 

I have. And the air is oddly quiet 
in the absence of a text vibration. 
Refreshingly, each step is fueled by a 
calmness and conviction to resist any 
urge to glance at my phone — I’ll check 
my Instagram direct messages later, 
after this walk.

Revisiting Jonestown: What we can learn from the 1978 mass-murder suicide

ANCHAL MALH

MiC Columnist

Content 
warning: 
this 
article 

discusses abuse and suicide. 

Growing up in New York City, my 

mother always tried her best to ensure 
that I felt connected to my heritage 
and the land my ancestors came from. 
This meant only having pepper-pot on 
Christmas Day, learning how to play 
cricket on the weekends and watching 
Indian movies every Saturday night. On 
Wednesday nights, after I had turned 
nine years old, she sat me down with a 
notebook and pen and began teaching 
me Guyanese history. Her eyes always 
lit up with pride as she educated me 
about the colors of Guyana’s flag and 
their symbolism: green for the beautiful 
forests that encompassed the region, 
white for the ever-flowing bodies of 
water, gold for the country’s abundance 
of minerals, black for the people’s 
perseverance to make Guyana a better 
country and red for the dynamic nature 
that holds together an independent 
nation. However, for this week’s history 
lesson, the dim light in the corner of 
our living room fell on her face, but the 
light in her eyes faded as she recalled the 
horrifying mass murder-suicide that 
occurred almost 43 years ago. 

We often say, “Don’t drink the 

Kool-Aid” to warn individuals not 
to blindly believe everything they 
hear. However, people may not know 
that this phrase stems from mass 
manipulation and false promises 
that ultimately led to more than 
900 dead bodies abandoned in the 
rainforests of Guyana –– the largest 
loss of American civilian lives pre-9/11 
(excluding natural disasters). 

Jim Jones was born on May 31, 

1931, in Crete, Ind. He would go on 
to become a preacher at the Peoples 
Temple, an Evangelist group based 
in San Francisco. In the 1950s, Jones 
became a leader who promoted 
desegregation and racial equality. He 
eventually gained a large following 
of primarily elderly, Black women 
and children due to his charismatic 
personality and ideas that preyed 
on an audience seeking acceptance 
in society. “My life was in turmoil, 
I had a failed marriage and I was 
looking for a place to be political in a 
safer environment after a series of bad 
decisions,” Laura Kohl, a survivor of 
Jonestown, stated when questioned 
about why she felt a sense of comfort 
in the Peoples Temple. However, with 
Jones’s newfound fame as a preacher, 
he became increasingly paranoid of 
the American government’s scrutiny. 

Jones preached about creating a 

utopian socialist society located in 
the jungles of Guyana to his followers 
who, believing in this, donated their 
money to move to Guyana and create 
a community named Jonestown. His 
supporters believed they were going to 
be welcomed by the tall palm trees that 
graced the rainforests of Guyana. They 
believed the wide and bright green 
leaves would protect them from the 
injustices they were facing in America. 
However, 
when 
these 
followers 

arrived, they were met with small 
and shabby huts located on nutrient-
deprived soil that was not sustainable 
for large groups. Their utopian socialist 
society resembled a prison camp. 
Survivors of Jonestown recall having 
to work long hours with minimal food 
while suffering abuse from Jones. 
He forced his followers to write him 
letters explaining their fears and past 
mistakes, and if he perceived that they 
“betrayed” him, Jones would divulge 
the information at weekly public 
meetings. “He started to alienate you 
from your families … destroy that 
family unit,” said Jonestown survivor 
Yulanda Williams. “So that then he 
could become the predator, but also 
the one who was the provider of 
every need that you required in life.” 
In addition, Jones would rehearse 

mass suicides in which followers were 
instructed to drink a beverage called 
Flavor-Aid, which was concocted by 
mixing a fruit-flavored powder with 
water, similar to Kool-Aid. Jones 
repeated this frequently as a test of 
their loyalty to ensure that on the day 
he officially decided to proceed with 
the previously mentioned murder-
suicide, Jonestown would have no 
survivors. 

Friends and families of followers 

that went to Jonestown became 
concerned with the idea that their 
loved ones were being held against 
their will after receiving letters that 
they believed were not truly written 
with excitement and joy. Concerned 
with the complaints from relatives 
and from reports of horrendous 
living conditions at Jonestown, U.S. 
Representative Leo Ryan, D-Calif., 
wrote to the House of Foreign Affairs 
asking to make a visit to the Peoples 
Temple in Guyana. Initially, Jones 
refused to have Rep. Ryan as a guest 
but eventually allowed him to come.

On Nov. 18, 1978, Rep. Ryan arrived 

on the Port Kaituma airstrip with 
several journalists and was allowed 
to visit the commune. During his visit, 
people in the commune told Rep. 
Ryan they wished to return home. 
Tension rose within the community 

as Jones became aware of this, so he 
decided to finally conduct the mass 
murder-suicide. As Rep. Ryan was 
on the Port Kaituma airstrip, he and 
several other journalists were shot by 
gunmen affiliated with the Peoples 
Temple. While Rep. Ryan was being 
attacked, followers at the commune 
were ordered to drink a grape-flavored 
punch laced with cyanide. After 
bodies dropped to the floor, Jones had 
his gunmen traverse the commune 
to ensure that all of his followers 
died. When examining bodies from 
Jonestown, 
inspectors 
discovered 

injections on many, affirming claims 
that those who played dead were 
later injected with lethal poison. Any 
remaining survivors were either asleep 
during the event, posed as a part of 
Rep. Ryan’s party or were sent by 
Jones to retrieve supplies or carry out 
negotiations with different nations.

As we move forward and reflect 

on the events of Jonestown, we must 
be mindful of the people who lost 
their lives seeking a paradise and 
liberation from constricting societal 
bounds. We must respect the efforts 
of the journalists who accompanied 
Rep. Ryan and sought to unmask the 
ugly truths of Jonestown. Survivors 
of 
Jonestown 
are 
continuously 

reminded of the psychological harm 

and danger they faced, many feeling 
extreme guilt for making it out alive. 
Saying “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” 
belittles the events of Jonestown and 
mocks the people who were victims of 
Jones’s terror. It reduces Guyana to a 
mere shell of a horrific legacy. 

When I think of Guyana, I hear 

the sound of Tassa drums ringing 
through the air on wedding days, 
signaling a time of joy and celebration 
in a neighborhood. I remember my 
summer visits to Guyana as a child, 
and I feel my bare feet touch the rocky 
ground, the clay-like soil seeping 
through my toes as I played hide and 
seek with my cousins. I see the cows 
roaming the neighborhood, heading 
towards the trenches to graze on the 
grass and sip water flowing through. I 
see the local shops that sell traditional 
Indian clothing, sarees and lenghas 
covered in small crystal diamonds 
with carefully hemmed neon flowers 
at the edge of each piece. But when 
the harmful idiom is said, it ceases 
the tropical breeze, dries out the 
water of my ancestor’s land, makes 
the once vibrant green leaves wilt in 
the sun and reduces Guyana to a mass 
graveyard. 

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Design by Marina Sun

9 - Wednesday, February 10, 2021 
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“That change, 

the gradual kind, 
sneaks up on you. 
I don’t think you 
realize it until it 

has already shifted 
your perspective 

and simply 

becomes you. For 
me, the change 
that I had been 
actively pursuing 
was happening all 
along, quietly and 
unsuspectingly.”

