When it comes to packing a suitcase the most practical of us often start defying reason. One of my cousins, despite being one of the smartest people I know, packed seven pairs of shoes for a two day trip and, of course, she ended up wearing only one pair. This need to pack a number of options either comes from the fear that an occasion may arise for which you might not be prepared or simply to have the luxury of choices. The fear can be overcome by being prepared for all likely situations and as for the latter, you simply have to face reality and learn how to come up with a well styled outfit with limited options.

The right suitcase: To pack a suitcase properly, you will first need to find a practical suitcase. The ideal suitcase for most trips would be a small roll on that you can use as a carry on. It will prevent you from waiting at baggage claim and from losing your luggage. Try getting a lightweight one that looks different. Also, carrying a large handbag or an extra tote, if your handbag is small, is always a good idea when travelling.

Checklist: Once you have a suitable suitcase, the first thing you will need is a checklist of all the things you wish to pack. When making the checklist, be mindful of the weather of your travelling destination and consider all the possible situations you might have to face. My mother always says that no matter where you are travelling, you should have at least one outfit fit for formal occasions.

Products: Limit the amount of products you will carry by purchasing the travel sized versions of the products that you use or by getting a set of travel size bottles which can be found in almost any drugstore. Be sure to label them and to wrap the liquids and creams in a zip lock bag to prevent spilling.

Clothes: When deciding which clothes to pack, do not forget to count the outfit you will be wearing when you start off as you can wear it again during your travels. To increase your options, pack separates like skirts, pants and tops that you will be able to mix and match and create new looks with. You can pack a dress that you can wear for both casual and formal occasions by changing the accessories. If travelling for more than a few days, try to pack cotton t-shirts and other such clothes that you can easily wash and dry in your hotel room – it will save you laundry expenses and keep your luggage light. And, try to keep in mind that clothes like jeans weigh a lot, so it is best not to pack too many of them if you have a weight limit to maintain.

Shoes: At all cost, refrain from packing more than two pairs. When you think about it, you do not really need more than three pairs. You can have a pair of comfortable heels that you can walk around in and use for a formal occasion, should it arise, a pair of flats which can be either ballet flats or open toed ones and, a pair of sneakers if your travels include athletic activities. If you wear one of these shoes and pack the rest in your suitcase, you have your three possible options for shoes.

Make-up and jewelries: Also, try to limit your make up and jewelry options by carrying only the basics. For instance, a pair of hoop earrings will go with almost every outfit. And, you might want to carry your jewelries and make-up in your large handbag along with a book or a magazine for your entertainment.

Placing items in your suitcase: Try to put your camera and cell phone chargers in the side pocket of your suitcase to avoid misplacing them. If packing dresses, lay them out at the bottom of the suitcase with the neckline and the hem line sticking out of the two sides of the suitcase, then place your other belongings on top of the middle portion of the dresses and then wrap the ends of the dresses on top of them like a bundle – this way you will avoid creases and save space. You can also roll up your t-shirts at the end and use it to fill the empty gaps in your suitcase.

If you happen to break your camera or phone while you were travelling, you can get them fixed at Photo Tech with a 10% student discount.

Bushra Tawhid

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For about two weeks at the start of this spring semester, I walked around campus with a navy ceramic mug in hand, my oxford shoes sliding over ice encrusted sidewalks and wool coat collar flapping against my chin.  I’d just spent my fall in London.  I only drank tea from the mug, which I did every morning on the walk from my dorm to my awful early morning class at 11.  It was a Look.  Then I slipped on some ice and spilled hot tea all down one leg, so the navy reusable, environmentally friendly ceramic mug retired to my window ledge.  I got a haircut, and I abandoned the chic-absurd European look for more college-friendly snow boots and sweatshirts.

the kind of look/impression/people I was trying to evoke

College is all about reinvention, whether fashionably for two pretentious weeks during the winter of junior year, or religiously for a while (as one of my friends became an evangelical Christian around the same time that I sought to represent Camden Town on our campus).  There’s the standard academic branching out: “There’s a class on African Dance that fills the physical exercise requirement and the social analysis requirement.  Let’s take that.  Also, it’s African Dance.  When else but college?”  You can become even more of a theatre geek (and within that there’s the Straight Plays camp and the Musicals camp), you might spend a summer in Korea and change your major to East Asian Studies, you might go to your first rave and spend the rest of your undergrad career learning how to DJ.  The college age is a volatile time in our lives; we have to create new identities to present an entirely new set of people.  College is the perfect environment for fertilizing our newly freed personalities; all the options are presented to us.  Every group wants you to join them, and we can reinvent our personalities and interests to better suit the people we wish we could have been in high school if it wasn’t for the small town/administration/parents.

I’ve been thinking a lot on the trajectory of my college reinvention lately, because I’m about to become a senior and the entire process of reinvention is about to start again—but this time without the impunities of undergraduate lifestyles.  I used to flake out on projects I didn’t really care about (let’s say I agreed to help because a friend of a friend asked); now I just say no if I’m uninterested.  I used to worry about the changing social scene of upperclassmen, and now that I’m an upperclassman I try my hardest to ignore the drama that so consumed my sophomore year.  My nights were filled with different friend groups and different plans.  But there’s a sense that anything I do from here on out goes down on some permanent record.  My pretentious Anglophilic phase won’t have a chance to resurface once I join the real world—professional mornings have no room for whimsically out-of-place utensils.  No room for quirky Salvador Dali-printed wallets.  Chipped white summer nail polish—perfect for blacklights—will have to be either retouched or removed every weekday.  I’ll have to reinvent a working personality and a personal personality.  I can favor the trend for white skinny jeans, still, or continue cultivating my place in the English major spectrum of graduates, but on my off-hours.  The task of establishing where I stand on postmodern minimalism, keeping in mind the impression it will make on other students and the judgments associated with my stance and the works that I’ll have to cite to explain my opinion—no longer my full-time job.  I have to choose now.  Will I be that flaky person senior year who everyone expects to flake?  Will that carry over in interviews and other jobs?  Am I the type to cheerfully champion what I know and ignore the rest, or will I bore my co-workers with the minutia of my personal research on Verizon versus T-Mobile, in both network coverage and variety of phones offered?  I might have to get recommendations from these people—I better figure out my work persona soon.

Of course, this dreadful sense of permanence is sort of panicky and young.  People change.  There are always new first impressions to make.  But I still feel that college is the best time to start over whenever you want.  There’s no better time to abandon a lifestyle—others are right there for you to pick up.  I could bleach my hair peroxide white (I’m a dark brunette) and fill my year with planning committees for formals and semiformals—I love planning parties.  I could get a tattoo somewhere conspicuous and take minimal classes and spend my fall camping every weekend on the nearby battlefields—I love camping.   Nobody cares.  And I guess I have a few months left to go through all the different identities I wanted to try on before I get thrust into that nebulous “real life” of rent obligations and job-hunting and impressing bosses that so many of my recently-graduated friends tell me about.  So I’m going to go get a haircut now (Shampoo on Avenue B has a student discount of 20% on all salon services, so maybe I’ll go there to see if I can do all the awful color-leaching processes to my hair that I want) and make plans to see a show.  Because that’s the kind of person I am this week.

x
Robin

I tweet while I’m at work. I have yet to master hashtags.
My personal blog: a chronicle of the shifting tastes that make up my student persona.

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I’m not a huge fan of tv, but when a good show comes around I can’t resist the desire to work my day around getting home to catch an episode. I watch True Blood, Boardwalk Empire and Dexter; all shows that require me to spend quality time at my sister’s house every Sunday night because my house doesn’t get HBO and Showtime. I’ve noticed that I tend to seriously follow only elite shows. But the average college kid doesn’t get the premium cable channels that such shows often run on, and as the summer ends and my precious shows run over into September, I have to scramble to find internet sites that will allow me to illegally watch movies and tv episodes that my basic cable college television prevents me from seeing. I even had to start buying movies from DVD Funhouse because I no longer had access to my sister’s massive movie collection.

I needed to find an alternative, find a show that wasn’t so hard to keep track of, no matter what season it was. All spring I gave every show a shot. I watched Swamp People, Deadliest Catch, Say Yes to the Dress, 16 and Pregnant (Yikes!), Intervention… the list goes on and on. If a show aired in March or April, I probably caught an episode or two of it. It wasn’t until last week that I caught the season premier of the show Wilfred on FX. The show follows a man named Ryan (Elijah Woods) that after a failed suicide attempt begins to see his neighbor’s dog, Wilfred (Jason Gann), not as a dog but as a man in a dog costume.  To everyone else, Wilfred is just a dog, but to Ryan, Wilfred is a trouble making, foul-mouthed Australian man. Wilfred has come into Ryan’s life at the time when he needs him most and gives him courage to go on with life. Though Wilfred is very smart, he’s a dog, and his animal instincts and doggy habits make him an incredibly funny character.  I couldn’t help but burst out laughing when Wilfred begins chasing after a car screaming “I’m going to kill you!!!!” and when Wilfred and Ryan are out to lunch and a waitress asks “does your dog normally eat nachos?” and you realize how crazy Ryan must feel.  By the end of the episode, Wilfred smokes a pack of cigarettes (he states he smokes because he has an oral fixation) and frames Ryan for breaking and entering their neighbor’s house.  The show continues this Thursday at 10 pm. I know I’ll be catching it. Will you?

-Jackie Aqel

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When you live in New York, it’s easy to forget about compassion. The Big Apple is known for many things: the diversity, the culture, the crowds, the cabs. But when you think about the city, compassion is usually not the first word that pops into your head. Perhaps loud or busy, but probably not sympathetic or understanding.

And that’s understandable. I mean, it’s easy to write all New Yorkers off as jerks just because a guy on the street shoved you around, or cursed you out, or that car driver blew past you riding the end of a yellow light. On a rainy day, the thought of New York City can conjure up the image of taxis splashing pedestrians with mucky puddle water, or bike riders unexpectedly flying out of traffic, headed straight at you.

Taking this mind set is not just overly pessimistic—it’s the easy way out. If you never let your guard down, then you’ll stay safe, right?

Wrong.

When I’m off in a different city, I try to rock the NYC attitude, I admit it—jaywalking like I’m late to meet Michelle Obama, giving cars obscene hand gestures when they piss me off—but I don’t think I could say that that too-cool New York scowl is a permanent fixture on the faces of our pedestrians. Since going on crutches three weeks ago, I’ve seen the faces of compassionate New York City workers popping up everywhere to give me a hand. In fact, one time a taxi driver just stopped for me without me having to hail him, to ask if I needed help, and conveniently enough, a taxi was just the help that I needed. When I’m hobbling around, everyone nearby suddenly becomes chivalrous: holding doors, stepping out of my way, providing directions to elevators, etc. Yes, there are the few who stay rude despite my condition, such as the bus driver who saw that I wanted to get on, but whose doors were already closed, and just shook his head and drove away, but I find these types of people are surprisingly few and far between in this city that’s supposedly known for its cold heart.

From my experiences over the past three weeks I’ve come to recognize the prevalence of the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is the tendency of people to underestimate the impact of situational factors in other people’s behavior, and at the same time overestimate the influence of dispositional factors on their actions. In other words, we often automatically attribute bad features to a person when they do something improper instead of considering their story, their perspective, in explaining why they might have done so. When I have a brace on my foot and crutches under my arms, people shed their Fundamental Attribution Error tendencies because they can directly see my back-story, or at least get an idea of it, and why it’s causing me to act the way I am.

I think that if all New Yorkers (and everyone else) were to start recognizing that every individual has a unique personal experience that leads them to take the actions that they do, we can create more compassion throughout the city, and that would be a great thing. If people could start taking down the NYC-guard that they’ve built up around themselves, the city could be a much nicer place to live.

/elizabeth Kaleko

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