Now and then, I stumble upon a new
hobby. I have a track record of dropping
commitments soon after I decide I want to
pursue them, which usually makes me doubt
the next will stick for long. Growing up, I was
a ballerina, a tap dancer and a cheerleader. I
quit all of them adamant that there were
other things that needed my time. These
“hobbies” are just distractions, I would tell
myself. I was partially right, though. I never
truly looked forward to doing these things
and I never regretted quitting. This was all
until I began writing and playing the ukulele.
This time around, I think these hobbies will
stick.
I started writing again a few years
ago after I finally rebuilt my shattered
confidence. All throughout my childhood,
adults in my life told me to focus on
something other than writing — something
I was better at. I willingly listened and
searched for a new passion, but in the
process, I unwillingly let go of my youthful
love for storytelling. In March 2020, I picked
up the pen out of boredom and wrote out
everything that had been pressing on my
mind. I then began writing poems, personal
stories, and whatever else came to my mind.
Once I fell back into the practice, I couldn’t
believe how I had ever stopped. Writing
brought me peace of mind at a time in my
life when I didn’t know that it was possible
to find peace and it continues to provide this
for me.
Over the summer, I wrote just for myself.
One day, I felt satisfied with what I had
written, and when I glanced at the time I
realized there was still so much of the day
left to fill. I grabbed my phone and did a quick
Google search on the easiest instrument to
learn. A list of instruments popped up and
the first instrument listed was a ukulele.
Without a second thought, I opened up
Amazon on a new tab and looked up
ukuleles. The screen was filled with varieties
of the small, four-string instrument. Each
one was covered in mahogany wood and
had thin white strings that glowed against
the wood. I endlessly scrolled, filled with
excitement at the possibility of being able
to play an instrument. Eventually one in
particular caught my eye. The engraved
body was meant to honor Hawaiian body
ornamentation. Throughout the summer, I
taught myself to play with the help of videos
on the internet. Once I was confident in my
ability to play, I started to sing along with
the music I was making. Day would fade into
night as I sat in my room learning strumming
patterns and chords for new songs.
I reflect back on what I’ve been doing over
the past year and I wonder whether or not
I’m wasting my time with these hobbies. I
think to myself, you’re just writing incomplete
thoughts in a Notes app and calling them
poems. There’s no one explicitly telling me
I’m wasting my time, but a voice in the back
of my head tells me that I could be doing
something more productive with my time.
I could be volunteering, or working or doing
homework, but instead, I let my entire day
slip away as my pinky reaches for the first
string of the ukulele to play an E chord.
6 — Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com
By Winston Emmons
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/06/21
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
10/06/21
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2021
ACROSS
1 Composer
Bartók
5 Word with ship or
school
9 Restoration
locations
13 Beasts that work
in pairs
14 Largely phased-
out ersatz fat
brand
16 Org. for fur foes
17 Envelope-
directing abbr.
18 “Out of Africa”
setting
19 Starting on
20 Three at the start
21 Ring result
23 1993 coming-of-
age baseball film,
with “The”
25 Hen or sow
26 Really long time
27 Surround sound
components
32 Unlicensed
rainbow catcher
36 Floral accessory
37 Urges
38 Backing
39 Place for a
catcher’s guard
40 Portuguese king
41 Camporee, for
instance
45 Former California
speedway that
was the site of
a 1969 rock
concert
47 Genetics lab
material
48 Director Jean-__
Godard
49 Evening parties
53 Tap water
58 Pre-A.D.
59 Injure
60 Willow twig
61 Dire prophecy
62 Nobelist Pavlov
63 Evans’ news
partner
64 __ sci
65 Elizabeth of
“La Bamba”
66 Torso muscles,
collectively
67 Watersports gear
DOWN
1 Lakeside rentals
2 Additional
3 Allowed to enter
4 Cleeves who
wrote Shetland
Island mysteries
5 Bed-ins for
Peace participant
6 Native Alaskan
7 Monthly expense
8 Belafonte classic
9 Lynn portrayer
in “Coal Miner’s
Daughter”
10 Mexican money
11 Minuscule amount
12 Ump’s call
15 Queasiness
21 Reputation stain
22 Winter warm spell
24 __ ex machina
27 Peacock’s gait
28 Scheme
29 K-12, in brief
30 Bit attachment
31 Do a number, say
32 Supermodel
Banks
33 Line holder
34 Handling the
matter
35 Familiar with
39 Sirius, e.g.
41 Lewd stuff
42 Pupa protector
43 2020 candidate
Beto
44 Inch or mile
46 Wellesley
graduate
49 Asparagus piece
50 Fodder for a Fire,
say
51 Food recall
cause
52 Truck stop array
53 Send using
52-Down
54 Finish, as a road
55 Algerian seaport
56 Colorado-based
sports org.
57 Digital recorder
61 MLB rally killers,
briefly, and a
hint to what’s in
the four longest
puzzle answers
SUDOKU
9
1
5
4
1
3
1
4
2
6
5
7
9
8
8
4
6
5
9
3
1
4
8
3
9
7
“HI MOM AND
DAD I MADE IT
IN THE PAPER
-J”
“I know I’m not
allowed to say
it; I miss you so
much.”
WHISPER
09/29/21
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
14 Postgame griper
19 It may be pitched
32 Come clean, with
injured ligament
On Sept. 22, students and faculty eagerly
gathered in the Rackham Graduate School
Auditorium and tuned in from home to hear
New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-
Jones speak about The 1619 Project
and its profound impact on our current
educational, social and political landscape.
Arriving at the auditorium an hour before
the event, attendees began lining up to
attend her talk. As they waited for the event
to start, they introduced themselves to each
other and began initiating relationships,
brought here by a mutual passion for
initiatives like those of Hannah-Jones. The
auditorium was abuzz, and the air was that
of unrestrained excitement. This collective
anticipation, palpable in the large gathering
space, was warranted; getting to listen to
Nikole Hannah-Jones speak was no small
event, after all.
Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for The
New York Times and has spent her storied
career pursuing a firm commitment to
discussing racial inequalities and injustice
in America. More recently, she became a
Pulitzer Prize winner for the body of work
of which she would be discussing with
us: The 1619 Project, a long-form project
through The New York Times that was
created with the intent to examine the
pervasive legacy of slavery in America.
While her plethora of accolades speak to
her excellence — she bolsters a Peabody
Award, MacArthur Genius Grant, two
George Polk Awards, amongst other
impressive accomplishments — she stands
as a revolutionary journalist, activist and
storyteller who has boldly redefined what it
means to confront history in America.
Upon her introduction, the crowd burst
into thunderous applause, only to fall into a
reverential, entranced silence as she began
to speak. From the start of the presentation,
Hannah-Jones
was
unflinching,
an
unapologetic force of nature as she provided
her honest accounts of the backlash she
received upon The 1619 Project’s release.
In an eloquent and unwavering recap of
the past year, she acknowledged former
president Donald Trump’s efforts to create
an entire commission against the project
while prominent senators worked tirelessly
to pass bills prohibiting its teaching
in schools. She continued to detail the
frenzied response that followed The 1619
Project, explaining its rapid progression
into an “intense disinformation campaign”
executed
through
social
media
and
mainstream conservative news platforms
who actively worked to pervert the project
into some heinous threat to the very
integrity of our nation. Almost in tandem,
a new phenomenon emerged in which the
teaching of Critical Race Theory became
synonymous with the goals of The 1619
Project, stoking a “faux-hysteria” that
resulted in concentrated legislative efforts
to ban CRT from being taught in classrooms.
The arguments and discontent stoked by
The 1619 Project were relentless, spawning
adamant accusations that the initiative
was divisive, revisionist by nature or an
attempt to exploit racial grievances and
further exacerbate existing polarization in
America.
In the face of such attacks, Nikole
Hannah-Jones
remained
resolute,
identifying the claims as exactly what
they were: efforts to preserve the ideas of
American exceptionalism that have been
sustained within our education system
for generations, favoring the teaching of a
propagandistic history as opposed to one
that forces individuals to confront the cruel
realities of our nation’s genesis. With the
motivation behind the mass hysteria and
concentrated legislative efforts illuminated
before us, the question then remains:
“Why?” Why, in a nation that prides itself on
free speech and the preservation of a rich
marketplace of ideas, had a project with this
very same intention become the target of
such intense opposition and disallowance?
In order to contextualize the ardent
disapproval of The 1619 Project, Nikole
Hannah-Jones recounts the past year:
notably, the murder of George Floyd and the
widespread Black Lives Matter protests that
arose as a response. The protests garnered
an unprecedented level of engagement,
with 69% of Americans claiming to have
had a discussion about race between June 4,
2020 and June 10, 2020. This mobilization
marked a paramount moment in American
history: non-Black Americans were not only
beginning to acknowledge the prominence
of police brutality in our nation, but
recognizing the systemic implications that
perpetuate it.
“You’re seeing a change in the national
lexicon in how majorities of Americans are
understanding the racial inequality that we
see today, and connecting the inequalities
that we see today to the legacy of slavery
that dates back 400 years,” Hannah-Jones
stated.
This new shift in the collective
understanding of systemic racism gave
rise to the possibility that our institutions
would be forced to confront the ways that
their power was founded on and amassed
through the subjugation of Black and
Brown individuals: to understand the
events of 2020, the collective would have
to understand the events of 1619. Hannah-
Jones cites this daunting combination as
the catalyst for the public’s fear. It was not
incidental that January 2021 marked the
incessant vilification of The 1619 Project,
and a bizarre obsession with Critical Race
Theory that spurred substantive legislative
efforts to limit its presence in public schools.
Upon
acknowledging
this
pattern,
Hannah-Jones poses a question to the
audience: “Why is it that when you feel like
your party is losing power, history is the
thing you go to? When I start excavating
the past … then it becomes something that is
dangerous and has to be legislated against?”
The answer lies in the significance of
history: how it is managed and manipulated
to shape our collective understanding of
the world, and how, when threatened,
institutions seek to preserve the version of it
that demands the least reconciliation.
Hannah-Jones’ description of history
is two-pronged, illustrating our nation’s
deliberate tendency to construct and
maintain a favorable version of the past:
“There’s history that’s what happened, on
what date, and who did it, and then there’s
history that is what we are taught about
what happened, on what date, and who did
it, and why, and what do we collectively …
think our history is?”
With this understanding of history’s
profundity and its immense power to
guide collective memory, it becomes clear
that The 1619 Project was never a direct
threat to America’s integrity. What is truly
threatened by initiatives like Hannah-Jones’
is the sanitized, delicately curated version of
American history that has long been upheld
by those in power. Unfortunately, the two
have become intimately interwoven, as the
preservation of our “American integrity”
has become seemingly contingent on an
active denial of our honest history.
Any attempt to shed light on alternative
narratives that have been selectively
omitted from our collective memories
thus threatens the institutions and power
holders that have utilized their retellings
of history to preserve their purported
superiority. Those individuals will call
these efforts blasphemous, “un-American,”
anti-patriotic — they will call it anything,
really, but the truth.
Nikole Hannah-Jones presents on history,
collective memory and the impact of journalism
LEEN SHARBA &
YASMINE SLIMANI
MiC Columnists
Read more at MichiganDaily.
Why I Won’t Choose
Between Passion and Productivity
MEGHAN DODABALLAPUR
MiC Columnist
One-time conversations
I’m sitting in a booth in the East Quad
dining hall, hunched over a small bowl of
beans and rice, when a voice coming from
my right asks me a question. It takes me
a few seconds to comprehend what this
person is asking because of the music
blasting through my headphones and the
empty, almost meditative state that my
mind takes when I’m eating.
I pull an earbud out. “I’m sorry, what
did you say?”
“Can I sit here?”
I nod and say yes to be polite, gesturing
towards the empty seat in front of me.
In reality, I am a little annoyed. For me,
lunch in the dining hall is an opportunity
to zone out completely and take a break
in between a long day of classes. The
last thing I want to do is have to talk to
a stranger while doing so. Still, I try to
be an agreeable person, so I offer up the
cushioned seat of the booth across from
me. There really isn’t anywhere else to sit
during the peak lunch hour.
The boy introduces himself to me
and I do the same. I don’t remember his
name. We talk about something, mostly
small talk with nothing of substance —
hometowns, majors, classes — and then I
finish my lunch and go about the rest of
my day.
I’ve always been a pretty quiet person.
I don’t like drawing attention to myself,
whether that be in class or in social
settings. Not shy exactly, because I’ll
speak up if I absolutely have to, but in new
situations, I prefer to keep my speaking
with strangers to a minimum. It was
something that was easy to accomplish
in my small high school, where I spoke
to only a handful of people each day and
during freshman year of college last
year when most social contacts were
nonexistent. This past month has been
the first time I’ve talked to strangers I
never intend to meet again.
Last year, I tried to force myself to
talk to many strangers. The intent of
these freshman year interactions was to
make friends. I talked to people with the
desire to talk to them again later, and then
again until we had exchanged enough
words and spent enough time together
to call each other friends. The results of
this were often tiring (and sometimes
disappointing). I remember listening to
advice from upperclassmen who said that
the people they talked to during the first
few weeks of college were people that
they never spoke to again. At the time, I
knew these words were meant to calm
the nerves of people who hadn’t made
friends, but they also undermined the
value of talking to people you will never
see again — an amazing activity that I
only started appreciating recently.
One-time
conversations
tend
to
be memorable for me. Even if I don’t
remember the names of the people that
I’ve spoken to, I do remember their
faces and random facts about them —
a language class they’ve taken or the
dorm they live in or where they’re from.
Because I’ll never see them again, there
is less pressure to remember their names
and we can instead have a very brief
moment of connection before continuing
on our separate paths. After spending
so much time cooped up at home, alone
with no one but my family, these little
conversations have become so much
more meaningful to me. They’re also
helping me acclimate to campus, adding
stories to the hundreds of faces I see each
day. Even though some might find these
conversations dry because of how routine
the conversations are — they rarely ever
scratch the surface of who someone is as
a person — I like seeing and hearing the
different responses that others have to
the same topics, like their favorite parts
of the University of Michigan (Alice
loves Nichols Arboretum Arb and Aisha
likes to study in the Michigan League)
or their favorite bubble tea spot in Ann
Arbor (Will likes ChaTime but Katie
thinks it’s overpriced). I might be a little
tired of repeating those things myself,
but it’s worth it to hear what the other
person has to say. The knowledge that
I’m probably never going to meet them
again is nice, too. It takes the pressure
off of the conversation and I feel more
relaxed than I do when I talk to a stranger
in class when I know I’ll see them the
next day. Any slip-up or awkwardness in
these moments will probably be quickly
forgotten and if it isn’t, at least that person
isn’t around every day to remind you of it.
SAFURA SYED
MiC Columnist
Design by Mellisa Lee
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Design by Madison Grosvenor
Read more at MichiganDaily.com