Customs Checkpoint

STOPPPPPPP!!!!!

All journeys have a starting point. As your official customs officers, we have the unfortunate task of telling you that you must return to the first post in August to properly read the blog. Got a problem? Talk to Ugresic, Kincaid, Hamid, or any of the many authors we have explored this semester about their frustrations with airports and customs regulations. Don't forget to keep your passport handy!

until next time...

Dear Blog-o-sphere,

Thanks for joining us on our ICS intellectual developmental journey. There have been moments of extreme frustration, epiphanies of epic proportions and conclusions and connections that we hope will be helpful for all our loyal followers. ICS has been more demanding on us than any of our other classes. It has required us to not only grasp theoretical concepts and contextualize them in the framework of this discipline, but also it has required us to share our personal experience and pull in information from all other areas of study.

Our frustrations in ICS 125 have been rewarded by ICS 200S. We have opened our minds to many different ways of envisioning and discussing both the world we live in and the world we wish to live in. We have been exposed to optimism and pessimism about the flow of goods and ideas throughout the world and have never been pressured to pick one world view. At times it has felt like we are on a a sea-saw constantly oscillating between different perspectives: east/west, optimistic/pessimistc, north/south, us/them, verbal/non-verbal, etc...

But ultimately, we are grateful for the opportunity we have been given to explore the world as well as our own belief systems. What ICS has succeeded in doing is making us so uncomfortable that we are forced to learn and try to find comfort through this process.

We have appreicated this extended time with the Quaker Rock and now wish to pass it on to the next class of ICS 200S students.


Ciao! Au revoir & Arrivederci!

Spitty (Haley Spitz) and Chaz (Charlie DePietro)

I see no Changez, I wake up in the morning and ask myself..

Found this interview with Mohsin Hamid while browsing the internet trying to find out how to pronounce Changez's name properly. While I think the class was able to understand many of the points rasied by Hamid, he explains the ending of the book, the way that it is received in different cultures and countries based on their interactions with terrorism, and the "empty gaps of the American perspective" which is deliberately left vague.

I love that the last thing we read for this class ended so ambiguously and forced each of us to look within ourselves to determine how we perceive the actions of the Pakistani...Also makes me wonder: is this book "a chilling thriller" or is that fabricated by an American perspective?

I also can't talk about this character without immediately thinking of this.