Community bike ride

I went out on a limb and tried something new last night.

I went on the Tucson community bike ride with a group of friends...and about 150 other people. Some of my friends were intimidated by the crowd when we got to the meeting place, the turn-around out front of UA's Old Main.

I was not at all intimidated by the eclectic-hippy-grunge crowd before us. I just wanted to ride, damnit.

The ride is supposed to start at 8 p.m., and we finally started to snake down University Ave. around 8:30. The ride, which I guess takes a new route every Tuesday, snaked through Southwestern Tucson and took us through back alleys and creepy neighborhoods with lots of dogs barking at us.

Had I been alone or with a small group of people, I would have been scared shitless. But it wasn't so bad with all those other people.

When we started out, it was also friggin' hot outside. But the breeze crept up, the night cooled the air a bit, and the ride was pretty nice by the end--before it started to get just plain windy.

Cons: the going was too slow and there was a lot of bottle-necking
Pros: opportunity to see parts of Tucson you never imagined seeing and getting to go on a leisurely ride with friends

It was an overall good experience. I'd recommend you try it at least once.

Mysterious Absence

My mysterious absence from my previously near-daily blogging endeavors can best be explained in two words: journalism thesis.

I had to scramble in the last weeks to get my quantitative analysis done (that I should have gotten done during my winter break when I was, you know, NOT IN SCHOOL). And that involved counting thousands of pages of magazines to figure out how many were content-only, advertising-only, mixed content and advertising, advertorials, complementary content, and on and on and on.

For the record, I didn't get any paper cuts. But my pinky and thumb were raw from my hand constantly dragging across pieces of paper, writing and flipping.

And I now shudder at the site of women's magazines. My latest issue of Elle came in the mail last week and I wanted to gag. Ugh, the thought of a 60+ to 4o ratio of advertising to content just makes me sick.

And Vogue is by far the worst. No matter how much I love runway fashion, I can't seem to understand why a magazine needs to be 840 pages if 638 of those pages are pure advertising. It makes no sense. It's stupid. It hurt my hand and my brain. And my intelligence.

I've come to a conclusion: women's magazines are (1) not journalism and (2) advertising machines. Don't read them. Marie Claire's OK. But don't read them.

Native Arizonan

After days of waiting, biting down all my fingernails at the thought of incurring $50 late fee charges because of bureaucratic miscommunication, I am now officially an Arizona resident again. Whew.

Campus Fashion

After four years, you'd think some things would go out of fashion forever. Especially things that were never fashionable or attractive in the first place, like Ugg boots.

There never ceases to be a plethora of girls wearing them on the UA campus--spring, summer, fall or winter. I have ranted about this phenomenon many times in the past; I am vehemently anti-Ugg boot.

I never really thought much about the rest of the Ugg outfit, though. The most appalling thing I've ever seen has been a girl, in January, wearing red hot pants, a gold puffy jacket with a faux fur collar and ugg boots. Coming in at a close second were the girls last spring and the spring previous who wore ugg boots with mini skirts. Those are fashion nightmares if ever there was one.

But the most common Ugg uniform is a track suit (usually Victoria's Secret with "PINK" plastered on the ass not in pink), bottoms stuffed haphazardly into the unshapely vomit-colored Ugg boots, or jeans and a sweatshirt or t-shirt (or t-shirt under a sweatshirt, take your pick). While these two combinations are more appropriate for said hideous footwear, the overall picture is a sad one. Young, attractive college women choose to run around in public looking like slobs.

It's the uniform, it's what they do. They get up, tie their hair messily back into a crappy bun or pony tail, plaster their faces with makeup (or leave their faces pastily plain), and tug on a UofA shirt and jeans, and the most unflattering shoes possible.

What does this say about fashion in Tucson? Nothing good.

What does this say about the fashion sense of many future business women, researchers, journalists, publicists and trophy wives? Certainly nothing good.

My point?

Somebody needs to burn all forms of "comfy" shoes. Otherwise, the idea of being fashionable when you're young is just going to be something future generations think of when they think about Elvis and Marilyn Monroe--long long ago, very attractive, but irrelevant.

Foreign Relations

When I studied in Germany in 2006, everything was set up in advance. I had a place to stay (dormitory), it was easy to get from the airport to the dormitory (although I stayed with grandparents, but that's a different story), and I knew I would be able to get around without a car.

When my tandem partner got here in the fall semester, he had no idea where he was going to live. Luckily, a friend who'd arrived before him had made arrangements for him to get from the airport and finally found him a roommate. He soon discovered he'd need a bicycle because Tucson is too spread out and there isn't adequate public transportation. He also discovered it was difficult to get groceries, as the closest grocery store was a bike ride away.

Last week I got an e-mail from a German girl who was on her way to Tucson and, having missed orientation week, wanted to know the cheapest way to get from the airport to the hostel she hoped to stay in. Hmm. Taxi? Expensive. Bus? Probably doesn't operate after 10 pm. So I offered to pick her up. She hadn't been able to exchange money for dollars in Chicago, and there was no place to do so in Tucson. Why would there be? The hostel (only one in town, as far as I know--and the first time I've ever heard of it) doesn't offer locks for lockers.

Then, I went to help her find a place to live, since she had no idea where she was going to stay with a few days before school starts. Apartment offices? Supposed to be open on Sunday, but all miraculously closed. The UA International Affairs office had told her it was super easy to find housing in Tucson. Hmm, not by my experience.

Does the university actually think lying to poor foreign students makes getting used to a strange place any easier? If they do, they're assholes. If I'd had to find a place to stay in Leipzig, I'd have been a writhing ball of nerves--a wreck. And they expect people to do it here like it's a piece of cake.

Therefore, I have decided (with a bit of prodding from my mother) to make the German Club more active in helping German, Austrian and Swiss (and maybe even those from Lichtenstein, should they come) students have an easier time of getting into Tucson and adjusting to life here. I mean, we can't just leave them homeless and (depending on the season) sweaty, wandering the streets of Tucson.