I was talking to my close friend Trevor Cable last year about what he did over breaks from school. Trevor was a senior at William and Mary last year. He told me that pretty quickly after high school was over, high school circles of friends would dissolve. People who used to be close friends would, sometimes purely out of convenience, forget about each other, or simply let the relationships slip away.

I didn’t believe Trevor at first. There was no way my circle of friends would break apart. But now, I know that he was right.

I will be a senior at William and Mary next semester. This is incredibly exciting. However, I was also looking forward to coming home for one last summer and being able to spend it with some of my high school friends before we all permanently went our separate ways. Unfortunately, for the most part, this isn’t happening. Many of my close friends are not coming home at all. Not because of scholarly pursuits or wanting to change the world, but simply because they didn’t really try.

I had the occasion to read through the founding history of the Psi Upsilon, and was struck with the similarity of today’s small group dynamics — blogs, forums, etc, particularly led and focused on collegiate interests and subjects. From their history page:

In the early 1800’s, as at other schools, literary societies played an important role in the life of Union College. These groups were encouraged by the faculty; they presented debates and orations, produced plays and maintained libraries. They also provided forums for discussion and social interaction which could not be found in the classroom. There was much rivalry for membership, literary supremacy, and political dominance on campus. The oldest of these, the Adelphic Society, was founded in 1792 and lasted into the nineteenth century. The Philomathean Society, which began in 1798, still exists.

The Delphian Society was started in 1819 and was known as more secretive and close knit than other societies. In 1833, five sophomore and two freshman members had become close friends. Their names were Samuel Goodale, Sterling Goodale Hadley, Edward Martindale, George Washington Tuttle, Charles Washington Harvey, Merwin Henry Stewart, and Robert Barnard. By the fall of 1833, the group of seven men had begun to meet regularly to read poetry and to exchange essays they had each written. It became a tradition to meet one night each week for these literary exercises. One night, after a particularly enjoyable session, Samuel Goodale said to Sterling Goodale Hadley, “Goodnight thine cordially.” In response, Hadley said, “Goodnight thine always.” This unique farewell was repeated at each session thereafter.

Gimme-five has become a pretty intense environmental blog lately, and I’m perfectly content with continuing that trend. Today I’m going to talk about Al Gore’s new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which will be hitting theatres this May 24th.

The best way to describe the movie is to watch the trailer. Basically, the trailer describes the effects of global warming. It discusses how events such as Katrina and other natural disasters, the melting of icecaps, and other weather related changes all have serious connections to our actions as a society. The most chilling line on the website is the following:

If a vast majority of our world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epedemics, and killer heat waves beyond anything that we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.

I am definitely seeing this movie on opening day. Not only does it stand for an issue I feel very strongly about, but supposedly it is very well-made, drawing fanfare virtually everywhere it goes.

In light of recent events involving the Kennedy clan of Rhode Island, I think we can draw comparisons to my little note on risk perception (outrage + real risk) to the spin control here on Patrick Kennedy’s behalf.

Once again, a fairly prominent member of society has a drug (or alcohol) addiction that has come into the public eye. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way when somebody talks about it being a “disease”. On one hand, yes, he is a Kennedy and the family has had more than their share of public addictions. And this isn’t a one sided Kennedy bashing, its just as wrong that Rush Limbaugh has drug issues.

Using the term “disease” just looks like an attempt to reduce the public outrage. By having a connotation of being an innocent afflicted with a “disease” that they have “caught” from just walking around, like “stomach flu”.

I guess what bothers me is that people buy it, especially from Patrick Kennedy. It isn’t a biological weakness, it is a character weakness. By his time, Patrick knows the family weaknesses. This isn’t catching a cold, this is arrogance in either ignoring family history (if you believe the genetic stuff).

I love my school, the College of William and Mary, but this is a little ridiculous.

For those of you who don’t know, our school goes by the nickname “The Tribe.” That really has nothing to do with the article, but I felt it necessary to explain the title. The outrage that I speak of has to do with the academic schedule for next year. Apparently Jamestown settlement is having their 400th birthday celebration around the same time that we will be graduating next year. Anticipating the difficulty of getting hotel rooms for commencement, the school administration has decided to push the entire academic year back a week. This includes all breaks that would normally line up with the breaks of most other schools.