Tag: springfest

Springfest

Hi! I’m Becca Carden, a freshman, and this is my first post for Innermost Parts.

This weekend was my first Springfest experience at Brandeis. It was really fun and beautiful, and very interactive.

But, as I am not an artist, I don’t get the opportunity to see student art very often during the school year. I do go to coffee houses, and I was impressed by the very cool cactus sculptures in the SCC earlier this semester. But can’t we have more? It would be great to have different art projects on display all over campus all year round.

Part of the reason Springfest/Festival of the Arts was so empowering for me was the general feeling of creativity that surrounded it, and I think Brandeis has the potential to promote this inspirational environment all the time. This weekend was great, but can we set up a stage on Chapel’s Field and have student music groups perform on some weekend when it’s not too cold? Or, could we put more visual art on display? Couldn’t we have a cappella in the SCC in the afternoons sometimes, or a surprise skit in the Usdan in the middle of the lunchtime rush?

Springfest is an awesome tradition, and I really enjoyed it. But maybe we can incorporate the art that it celebrates into the everyday Brandeis experience.

A Few Thoughts About the Aquapocalypse

On Saturday night, I was killing time and decided to buy a soda at Hannaford’s.  While I was waiting in line, I took notice of the crowds which were mobbing the various check-out aisles.  What every single person had in common was a harried look in their eyes, and what separated the crowd into two chunks was water; there were those who had amassed a shopping-cart’s worth of bottles and crates of water, and those who hadn’t arrived in time.  In the twenty minutes which it took me to get to the front of the line, a time which was frequently punctuated by the shouts for the manager demanding more water, I began to realize that were I not on campus, I would be in the same position, unsure whether or not I would have any access to clean water for an indeterminate amount of time.

As the weekend wore on, I started feeling thirsty at all hours of the day.  This may have been due in part to the heat, as well as the amount of time I spent at Springfest, but I began to wonder if other people felt the same way.  Was my desire for water influenced by my recognition that I could not have a constant flow in my water bottle at any time of the day? This is to say nothing of the fact that 1/8th of the world’s population has no access to clean drinking water, but this made me realize that as a student at Brandeis, I was given access to essential resources when they were sorely needed by the community.

Yesterday morning, the entire campus woke up to great news when we were told that the crisis was over.  I admit that that this was a relief for me, but I considered some of the people who were “suffering” more than I was.  For example, I don’t drink coffee, but I overheard a student at Einstein’s complaining about how they had to drive thirty minutes into Cambridge in order to find an open coffee shop.  When I actually considered the troubles that plague people around the world, however, it made me realize how trivial this is.